President Donald Trump’s government allowed an unnamed Securities and Exchange Commission investigator to hold stock in companies being probed, deeply alarming experts concerned with conflicts of interest, according to a new report.
The investigator, whose name was redacted from a document revealed Friday by by NOTUS, was reportedly allowed to hold onto shares of Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft. The waiver was signed on May 28 by David Reinhold, the director of the SEC’s Office of Human Resources.
It is the only waiver among more than 250 issued since Trump took office in which the recipient’s identity was hidden — and one of only two instances of name redaction among more than 16,600 total government ethics filings on record, according to the report.
Craig Holman, a government affairs lobbyist at Public Citizen who reviewed the waiver, reportedly called it a “huge red flag.”
The stocks make up a “significant” portion of the individual’s assets, Holman wrote in an email to NOTUS, and the holdings “alone can be a serious potential conflict of interest that could affect the official’s decisionmaking.”
“The solution is to make the official divest of these investments or find someone else to do the job who is not so conflicted,” he wrote.
The waiver’s author took a different view. Reinhold wrote that the official’s stake is “not so substantial as to affect the integrity of the services which the government may expect from you.”
The SEC declined to comment.
It’s not the first time the Trump administration has raised conflict of interest concerns.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche shut down Justice Department investigations into crypto companies while holding between $159,000 and $485,000 in cryptocurrency — before he had divested, as he had promised, ProPublica reported.
A Department of Government Efficiency aide, Gavin Kliger, helped oversee the layoffs of more than 1,400 Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employees while holding up to $365,000 in stock in companies the bureau regulates — including the ethics lawyers who had warned him, ProPublica reported.
According to financial disclosures, Trump’s own investment accounts bought up to $1 million in Nvidia stock on Jan. 6, 2026. One week later, his administration loosened export controls, allowing Nvidia to sell chips to China.
Presidents are exempt from the conflict-of-interest law that applies to their staff.
“The presidential exemption in the law undermines public confidence in the government,” said Richard Painter, who served as the top ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush White House.
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