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Report Details Massive Federal Contracts, Enforcement Actions Against Trump's Ballroom Donors
"These are not random donations," said Public Citizen. "It's a clear-as-day effort to kiss up to the Trump administration."
Nov 03, 2025
As President Donald Trump has embarked on the $300 million demolition of the East Wing of the White House—a project he insists has been "longed for" for more than a century—he has openly said that he and "some of [his] friends" are paying for the ballroom he is building.
But an analysis on Monday detailed just how "massive, inescapable, and irremediable" the donors' conflicts of interest are, as more than a dozen of the presidents' "friends" have major government contracts and are facing federal enforcement actions.
The White House has denied that corporate donors to Trump's ballroom construction project have any conflicts of interest, but Public Citizen found that 16 out of 24 publicly disclosed contributors—including three identified by CBS News but not by the White House—have government contracts.
The companies, including Amazon, Google, Lockheed Martin, and Palantir Technologies, have received $279 billion in government contracts over the last five years and nearly $43 billion in the last year. Lockheed is by far the biggest recipient, having received $191 billion in defense contracts over the last five years. The amount the companies have each donated to the ballroom construction has not been disclosed, but Lockheed spent more than $76 million in political donations from 2021-25.
The money the corporations have spent to build Trump's ballroom, said Public Citizen, "are not random donations. It's a clear-as-day effort to kiss up to the Trump administration."
Lockheed is among at least 14 ballroom contributors that are facing federal enforcement actions, including labor rights cases, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) enforcement, and antitrust actions.
The National Labor Relations Board has before it cases alleging unfair labor practices by Lockheed as well as Google and Amazon.
The big tech firm Nvidia, another donor, has previously been accused of entering into a "quid pro quo" arrangement with the White House when it said it would give 15% of its revenue from exports to China directly to the Trump administration. The company has spent more than $6 million on political donations since 2021 and more than $4 million on lobbying, and faces a Department of Justice antitrust investigation into whether it abused its market dominance in artificial intelligence computer chips.
While Trump has sought to portray the ballroom fundraising drive as one in which his wealthy "friends" have simply joined the effort to beautify a cherished public building, Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman said the companies are not acting "out of a sense of civic pride."
"They have massive interests before the federal government and they undoubtedly hope to curry favor with, and receive favorable treatment from, the Trump administration," said Weissman. "Millions to fund Trump’s architectural whims are nothing compared to the billions at stake in procurement, regulatory, and enforcement decisions."
In total, the 24 companies identified as ballroom donors spent more than $960 million in lobbying and political contributions in the last election cycle and $1.6 billion over the last five years.
Weissman said the companies' contributions to the president's pet project amount to corporate America "paying tribute" to the White House in order to stave off unfavorable labor rights and antitrust rulings, energy and financial regulations, and SEC actions and oversight, like an investigation into the cryptocurrency firm Gemini over alleged sales of unregistered securities.
"This is more than everyday corporate influence seeking. Paying tribute is a mark of authoritarianism and in making these payments, these corporations are aiding Trump’s authoritarian project," said Weissman. "They should withdraw their contributions.”
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Trump Admin Circulating Plan to Transform Depopulated Gaza Into High-Tech Cash Cow
Under the proposal, the US would take control after "voluntary" relocation of Palestinians from the strip, where proposed projects include an Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone and Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands.
Sep 01, 2025
The White House is "circulating" a plan to transform a substantially depopulated Gaza into US President Donald Trump's vision of a high-tech "Riviera of the Middle East" brimming with private investment and replete with artificial intelligence-powered "smart cities."
That's according a 38-page prospectus for a proposed Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration, and Transformation (GREAT) Trust obtained by The Washington Post and published in a report on Sunday. Parts of the proposal were previously reported by the Financial Times.
"Gaza can transform into a Mediterranean hub for manufacturing, trade, data, and tourism, benefiting from its strategic location, access to markets... resources, and a young workforce all supported by Israeli tech and [Gulf Cooperation Council] investments," the prospectus states.
However, to journalist Hala Jaber, the plan amounts to "genocide packaged as real estate."
Here comes the Gaza Network State.A plan to turn Gaza into a privately-developed “gleaming tourism resort and high-tech manufacturing and technology hub” with “AI-powered smart cities” and “Trump Riviera” resortgift link:wapo.st/4g2eATo
[image or embed]
— Gil Durán (@gilduran.com) August 31, 2025 at 10:18 AM
The GREAT Trust was drafted by some of the same Israelis behind the controversial Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose aid distribution points in Gaza have been the sites of deliberate massacres and other incidents in which thousands of aid-seeking Palestinians have been killed or wounded.
According to the Post, financial modeling for the GREAT Trust proposal "was done by a team working at the time for the Boston Consulting Group"—which played a key role in creating GHF. BCG told the Post that the firm did not approve work on the trust plan, and that two senior partners who led the financial modeling were subsequently terminated.
The GREAT Trust envisions "a US-led multirlateral custodianship" lasting a decade or longer and leading to "a reformed Palestinian self-governance after Gaza is "demilitarized and de-radicalized."
Josh Paul—a former US State Department official who resigned in October 2023 over the Biden administration's decision to sell more arms to Israel as it waged a war on Gaza increasingly viewed by experts as genocidal—told Democracy Now! last week that Trump's plan for Gaza is "essentially a new form of colonialism, a transition from Israeli colonialism to corporate" colonialism.
The GREAT Trust contains two proposals for Gaza's more than 2 million Palestinians. Under one plan, approximately 75% of Gaza's population would remain in the strip during its transformation. The second proposal involves up to 500,000 Gazans relocating to third countries, 75% of them permanently.
The prospectus does not say how many Palestinians would leave Gaza under the relocation option. Those who choose to permanently relocate to other unspecified countries would each receive $5,000 plus four years of subsidized rent and subsidized food for a year.
The GREAT Trust allocates $6 billion for temporary housing for Palestinians who remain in Gaza and $5 billion for those who relocate.
The proposal projects huge profits for investors—nearly four times the return on investment and annual revenue of $4.5 billion within a decade. The project would be a boon for companies ranging from builders including Saudi bin Laden Group, infrastructure specialists like IKEA, the mercenary firm Academi (formerly Blackwater), US military contractor CACI—which last year was found liable for torturing Iraqis at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison—electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla, tech firms such as Amazon, and hoteliers Mandarin Oriental and IHG Hotels and Resorts.
Central to the plan are 10 "megaprojects," including half a dozen "smart cities," a regional logistics hub to be build over the ruins of the southern city of Rafah, a central highway named after Saudi Crown Prime Mohammed bin Salman—Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states feature prominently in the proposal as investors—large-scale solar and desalinization plants, a US data safe haven, an "Elon Musk Smart Manufacturing Zone," and "Gaza Trump Riviera & Islands" similar to the Palm Islands in Dubai.
In addition to "massive" financial gains for private US investors, the GREAT Trust lists strategic benefits for the United States that would enable it to "strengthen" its "hold in the east Mediterranean and secure US industry access to $1.3 trillion of rare-earth minerals from the Gulf."
Earlier this year, Trump said the US would "take over" Gaza, American real estate developers would "level it out" and build the "Riviera of the Middle East" atop its ruins after Palestinians—"all of them"—leave Palestine's coastal exclave. The president called for the "voluntary" transfer of Gazans to Egypt and Jordan, both of whose leaders vehemently rejected the plan.
"Voluntary emigration" is widely considered a euphemism for ethnic cleansing, given Palestinians' general unwillingness to leave their homeland.
According to a May survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, nearly half of Gazans expressed a willingness to apply for Israeli assistance to relocate to other countries. However, many Gazans say they would never leave the strip, where most inhabitants are descendants of survivors of the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel in 1948. Some are actual Nakba survivors.
"I'm staying in a partially destroyed house in Khan Younis now," one Gazan man told the Post. "But we could renovate. I refuse to be made to go to another country, Muslim or not. This is my homeland."
The Post report follows a meeting last Wednesday at the White House, where Trump, senior administration officials, and invited guests including former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, investor and real estate developer Jared Kushner—who is also the president's son-in-law—and Israeli Minister of Strategic Affairs Ron Dermer discussed Gaza's future.
While Dermer reportedly claimed that Israel does not seek to permanently occupy Gaza, Israeli leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including murder and forced starvation in Gaza—have said they will conquer the entire strip and keep at least large parts of it.
"We conquer, cleanse, and stay until Hamas is destroyed," Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently said. "On the way, we annihilate everything that still remains."
The Israel Knesset also recently hosted a conference called "The Gaza Riviera–from vision to reality" where participants openly discussed the occupation and ethnic cleansing of the strip.
The publication of the GREAT Trust comes as Israeli forces push deeper into Gaza City amid a growing engineered famine that has killed at least hundreds of Palestinians and is starving hundreds of thousands of more. Israel's 696-day assault and siege on Gaza has left at least 233,200 Palestinians dead, wounded, or missing, according to the Gaza Health Ministry—whose casualty figures are seen as a likely undercount by experts.
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The $50 Million Venetian Wedding of Robber Baron Jeff Bezos
Like the ruthless tycoons of yore, his business practices are unethical, he has amassed a vast fortune on the backs of his workers, and he has brutally stifled competition and controlled markets.
Jul 07, 2025
With all the fawning coverage of Jeff Bezos’ storybook $50 million Venetian wedding, the news media lost sight of fact that Bezos—the third-richest person in the world—is hardly worthy of veneration. He’s been exploiting Amazon workers for years.
Historians have drawn parallels between the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and what we are experiencing today. Like the first Gilded Age, Gilded Age 2.0 is marked by increasing economic inequality, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and a rise in populism and social unrest.
Jeff Bezos fits the profile of a latter-day robber baron to a T. Like the ruthless tycoons of yore, his business practices are unethical, he has amassed a vast fortune on the backs of his workers, and he has brutally stifled competition and controlled markets.
Amazon terrorizes its workers
With their manifestly unsafe working conditions, Amazon warehouses are a 21st-century version of a Gilded Age sweatshop. Despite the company’s claims that it protects its workforce, an 18-month investigation released last December by a Senate committee led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) found that the nation’s second-largest private-sector employer risks its workers’ health and safety by prioritizing speed and profit, and it is doing quite well on that score. Last year, the company outpaced Walmart, the largest private-sector employer, by netting $59.2 billion—a 95 percent increase from 2023.
“Amazon forces workers to operate in a system that demands impossible rates and treats them as disposable when they are injured,” Sanders said in a statement. “It accepts worker injuries and their long-term pain and disabilities as the cost of doing business.”
Based on Amazon’s own data, the Senate committee found its warehouses recorded 30 percent more injuries in 2023 than the warehousing industry average and that the company systematically underreported injuries to hide the fact that its facilities are significantly more dangerous than that of other companies. It also found that Amazon workers, who represent about 29 percent of the U.S. warehousing industry workforce, were nearly twice as likely to be injured as other company warehouse workers in each of the previous seven years.
The committee, which contacted nearly 500 former and current Amazon employees, also uncovered evidence that Amazon is aware that its oppressive productivity demands are causing frequent injuries. The company drafted plans to lower injury rates but never implemented them because it feared they would undercut profits.
Amazon pays its workers peanuts
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains the company’s executive chairman and biggest shareholder, paid himself a salary of $81,840 in 2020 and earned $1.6 million in compensation. That may not seem so excessive, but he makes the bulk of his money from stock. All told, between 2023 and this year, he made about $8 million an hour.
By contrast, Amazon’s 1.2 million warehouse workers are just scraping by. They make anywhere from $8.41 to $20.19 an hour, according to data compiled by Zip Recruiter. Their average hourly rate—$16.35—amounts to only $34,000 a year.
Roughly half of nearly 1,500 Amazon warehouse workers surveyed in the spring of 2024 by the Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED) at the University of Illinois Chicago reported that they struggle to afford enough food or a place to live. A third of them had to rely on public assistance, mainly in the form of SNAP benefits.
“Many Amazon associates cannot pay their bills, they can’t afford proper housing,” one survey respondent told CUED researchers. “Some of my coworkers have been forced out of their homes. We are stuck in a nightmare, living in an economy that puts no cap on worker exploitation, while our wages can’t keep up with the increase in our cost of living. This cycle has to stop.”
Most of the Amazon warehouse workers’ attempts to unionize have been squelched by the company, which spent more than $17 million on anti-union consultants from 2022 through 2023. In 2021, a labor activist group, the Congress of Essential Workers, founded the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which successfully organized an 8,300-person warehouse on Staten Island in March 2022. ALU affiliated with the Teamsters Union in June 2024, but to date, no other warehouses have been unionized.
Amazon slapped with tens of millions in fines
Since 2000, lawsuits by government authorities and private parties have cost Amazon (including Whole Foods) more than $283 million for a range of violations, notably consumer protection, employment, environment, government contracting, and workplace safety offenses, according to data compiled by Good Jobs First, a nonprofit group that promotes government and corporate accountability. Nearly 60 percent (101) of the 173 violations in those five categories involved workplace safety.
Amazon warehouse and delivery operation violations since 2020 are staggering.
- The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Amazon more than $1.35 million for 23 workplace violations. Three state agencies collectively fined the company nearly $600,000 for similar health and safety offenses.
- Federal and state authorities fined the company nearly $74.2 million for five wage and hour violations, while private lawsuits forced the company to pay $26.45 million in restitution.
- The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice fined the company $25 million for privacy law violations, including illegal surveillance and unauthorized medical inquiries. A similar privately brought case in federal court forced Amazon to pay $95 million.
Less enforcement under the Trump administration?
Will the Trump regime be as aggressive as previous administrations in prosecuting Amazon for its labor infractions? Given the efforts by Bezos and Amazon to curry favor with Donald Trump, probably not.
Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and in January, it was widely reported that the company will pay a whopping $40 million to license an upcoming documentary about Melania Trump to be released in theaters and streamed on Prime Video. The first lady will serve as executive producer.
In February, Trump nominated Amazon’s former senior safety executive, David Keeling, to head OSHA. During Keeling’s tenure at Amazon, the company was cited numerous times for failing to meet the OSHA requirement “to furnish a place of employment which was free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees,” according to the Department of Justice. (The Senate has yet to confirm his nomination.)
Since then, Bezos has gone even further to placate Trump. In late April, Punchbowl News reported that Amazon planned to display on its website how much Trump’s tariffs are inflating the price of each product. In response, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “a hostile and political act” and Trump phoned Bezos to complain. Bezos backed down immediately.
Then there’s what Bezos has been doing to wreck one of the top newspapers in the country—The Washington Post—which he bought in 2013. But that’s a column for another day.
Suffice it to say, the rap sheet on Bezos is long—and damning. Like his fellow robber barons of the day, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a man who deserves our reverence. Uncritical worship of billionaires like Bezos just may exacerbate an already dangerous level of social inequality. So let’s not go gaga over Bezos’ grandiosity.
This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.
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