Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sold potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock just days before Donald Trump’s sweeping reciprocal tariffs went into effect, ProPublica reported Monday.
Duffy sold between $75,000 and $600,000 of stock on February 11, just two days beforeTrump first announced that he had instructed his trade advisers and federal agencies to examine imposing “reciprocal tariffs” on a “country-by-country” basis. Duffy sold $50,000 more the day of the announcement.
Duffy sold stock in 34 different companies, several of which were part of an ethics agreement he’d made to sell stocks where he might have a conflict of interest, according to disclosure records he filed with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics. Other companies he sold stock in include some companies that are projected to take hits as a result of Trump’s tariffs, such as Shopify and John Deere, which is expected to have a whopping $500 million in new costs as a result of Trump’s trade policy. Duffy also sold stocks in companies that are unlikely to be directly affected by the tariffs.
A Transportation Department spokesperson told ProPublica that Duffy “had no input on the timing of the sales,” and that his transactions were “part of a retirement account and not managed directly by the Secretary.”
“The Secretary strongly supports the President’s tariff policy, but he isn’t part of the administration’s decisions on tariff levels,” the spokesperson said.
While it’s certainly not clear that Duffy was privy to discussions about Trump’s tariff announcement before it was made, he has credited himself for laying the groundwork for the transformative (i.e. destructive) trade policy through his work on a piece of failed legislation called the U.S. Reciprocal Trade Act during his time in Congress. Duffy has said that Trump’s current policy is the “cumulation” of the work he did on that bill.
Duffy isn’t the only Cabinet member to dump stock at a suspiciously convenient time. Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 and $5 million of her share in Trump Media on April 2, the same day the president’s “Liberation Day” tariff war announcement broke the stock market, according to reporting from ProPublica. Trump Media stocks specifically fell 13 percent that day.
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