The 2026 cabinet's stock-trading conflicts, agency by agency.

The rules that exist on paper

Five statutes do most of the work, in theory:

1. Ethics in Government Act (1978) and 18 U.S.C. § 208 — bars federal officials from participating in matters that affect their financial interests.
2. STOCK Act (2012) — extended insider-trading prohibitions to the executive branch and Congress, and required disclosure of trades over $1,000.
3. OGE Form 278e — public financial disclosure filed within 30 days of nomination.
4. OGE Form 278-T — periodic transaction report for any individual trade over $1,000.
5. 5 CFR Part 2634 Subpart D — qualified blind trusts and qualified diversified trusts. The initial portfolio of a diversified trust may not include securities with substantial activities in the official's primary area of federal responsibility.

For specific cabinet posts there are statutory bans on top of those rules. The most important one: the Secretary of Defense may not own stock in Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls Industries, Boeing, or L3Harris — even outside of wartime, even in a diversified trust. We call them the Forbidden Seven.

The iShares Defense Industrials Active ETF (ticker IDEF, ~$3.1B AUM) wraps all seven of those companies into a single ETF. That ETF is the asset Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's Morgan Stanley broker is alleged to have asked BlackRock about, in February 2026, weeks before the U.S.-Israel strikes on Iran began on February 28. The trade did not execute because IDEF was not yet on Morgan Stanley's product shelf. The Pentagon called the FT's reporting "entirely false." Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote SEC Chair Paul Atkins on April 20 asking for an investigation, citing the federal statute that criminalizes attempted securities fraud. Read the full Hegseth/BlackRock breakdown →

The 2026 cabinet conflict scoreboard

Below: every cabinet-level official with a publicly reported stock-trading or financial-interest conflict in 2026, the receipt, and the rule that was supposed to stop it. Sources are inline. Severity: red = named legal exposure / pending investigation. amber = compliance failure, no current prosecution. blue = disclosed and under scrutiny but no enforcement action.

The "outside manager" defense — and why it's so hard to break

Three of the cabinet conflicts above (Duffy, Bondi, plausibly Hegseth) rest on the same defense: the trade was made by an outside investment manager and the official had no input on timing. The defense is plausible — wealthy people use discretionary advisors all the time. It is also unusually hard to falsify without subpoena power. The relevant evidence sits in:

• The official's OGE 278e account list (which advisor manages which account), and
• The advisor's FINRA Form U4 and the brokerage's communications with the official.

The OGE forms are public. The brokerage records are not. Without the SEC, DOJ, or Senate Intelligence Committee actually subpoenaing the brokerage records, the "outside manager" defense is an unanswerable claim. That is one reason the Hegseth/BlackRock story matters out of proportion to the dollar amount: BlackRock's records exist, and the FT cited four sources.

Three watchdogs that are missing

The reason the cabinet conflict pattern is reaching this density in 2026 — and why prior administrations had similar disclosure failures without the same number of named investigations — is that three of the four enforcement bodies have been hollowed out:

• OGE Director David Huitema — sworn in December 16, 2024; fired by President Trump on February 10, 2025. The Office of Government Ethics is the agency that processes 278e/278-T filings and refers ethics violations.
• Office of Special Counsel head — removed early 2025. OSC handles whistleblower complaints about executive-branch conflicts.
• DOJ ethics enforcement — President Trump has reportedly directed the Department of Justice to deprioritize ethics-law prosecutions.
• SEC — Chair Paul Atkins is also a Trump appointee. Whether the SEC opens the Hegseth investigation Warren has requested will be a critical signal of whether the regulatory regime is functioning at all.

What journalists, citizens, and engineers can actually do

The hard truth: there is no enforcement layer above Congress and the SEC, and both are politically constrained. The functioning enforcement layer that remains is visibility. That is the layer GovGreed sits in. We index every public 278-T filing, every congressional STOCK Act trade, every roll-call vote, every committee meeting, every FEC contribution, every Senate LDA lobbying filing, every USASpending federal contract, and every SEC Form 4 corporate insider trade — into a unified queryable graph. Then we score it.

You can:

1. Run a conflict check on your own representative. Type your ZIP at /conflict-check. We return your two senators and your House member with a 0–100 conflict score, hit-list of bills they voted YES on while holding affected stock, top donors, top tickers, and committee jurisdictions.
2. Browse the executive cabinet at /executive. Each cabinet position has a baseball-card view: the official, federal contracts awarded by their department in the last 120 days, and recent legislation touching their jurisdiction.
3. Use the API. The /api docs page documents seven free read-only endpoints. CC BY 4.0 license on the data. Cite govgreed.com.

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