A group of lawmakers demanded answers from the White House this week following a ProPublica investigation revealing that a top aide to the president intervened to secure a $620 million Pentagon loan to a startup linked to the president’s eldest son.

ProPublica’s reporting “reveals a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling that superseded this process, enriching the President’s son at the expense of U.S. national security and taxpayer dollars,” wrote the group of Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii as well as Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado and Mike Levin of California.

Last year, the Pentagon announced the loan to Vulcan Elements, a small North Carolina startup, about three months after Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm took a stake of undisclosed size in the rare-earth magnet company.

Interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to lend to the firm was made by Peter Navarro, who serves as the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing and is a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly told ProPublica.

After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.

In their letter, addressed to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the lawmakers asked a series of questions about Navarro’s involvement in the deal, including whether he intervened at someone else’s direction, if the president was aware or involved, and who Navarro communicated with at the Pentagon.

They also asked more broadly about whether White House officials have communicated with federal agency officials about other companies linked to the Trump family.

“The American public — and service members that are in harm’s way — expect that the DoD contracting process is fair, unbiased, and competitive to ensure that only the best companies, providing only the best products, receive taxpayer dollars,” the lawmakers wrote.

Navarro, who served as trade adviser in the president’s first term, and Trump Jr. have formed a close bond in recent years. The president’s son visited Navarro in prison while he served time for defying a subpoena from lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump Jr. was one of the small group of people Navarro dedicated his latest book to for having “my back when it was against the wall.” And a week before the Vulcan deal was announced, Trump Jr. hosted Navarro on his streaming show, encouraging his nearly 2 million subscribers to buy Navarro’s book. That interview was not long after word came down from Navarro to Pentagon staff to make the massive loan to Vulcan, one of the defense officials involved in the deal said.

Asked to respond to the lawmakers’ allegations and ProPublica’s reporting, Navarro in a text message wrote “Staggering level of hyperbole. More fake news” but did not elaborate. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Navarro did not respond to questions from ProPublica sent to him directly before the initial article was published. But in a post on X afterward, he called the story “fake news on steroids.”

Vulcan has not commented. A White House spokesperson had said in a statement that the administration is working “in the best interest of the American people,” adding, “The President’s entire team, including Senior Counselor Navarro and officials at the Department of War, is working together and with private industry to secure America’s critical mineral supply chain at Trump Speed.” Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said last week that the president’s son does not discuss companies he has invested in with federal government officials and did not speak to Navarro about Vulcan. He “has no knowledge about how this deal came together,” the spokesperson said. A spokesperson for 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Trump Jr. is a partner, said it also played no role in Vulcan getting the loan and did not learn about the deal before it was public.

“No company receives preferential treatment,” a Pentagon spokesperson said. “Outside affiliations, investors, or political connections play absolutely no role in the Department’s funding decisions.”

The loan was part of the Pentagon’s effort to fund companies that could help the U.S. reduce dependence on China’s critical mineral supply chains. It represented a big win for Vulcan and its investors. Estimates of the company’s valuation grew tenfold after the deal was announced.

The deal is one of many actions by the administration of President Donald Trump that have helped companies in which his family holds stakes. Government contracts and other benefits have gone to various Trump-linked companies. But ProPublica’s reporting on the Vulcan loan represented the first time the awarding of a contract from a federal agency was directly linked to White House intervention.

A number of other lawmakers also criticized the Vulcan deal following ProPublica’s investigation.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, called it “corruption to the highest degree,” alleging on X: “They are looting this country. Dismantling it, selling it for parts, and lining their own pockets.”

Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, called for a congressional investigation. “It’s just nonstop corruption from this White House, and Republicans in Congress are content to twiddle their thumbs and look right in the other direction,” she posted on X. “Congress should be investigating and putting a stop to this kind of crooked self-dealing—not enabling it.”

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

The edict marks the culmination of a years-long push to make it easier to fire federal employees in “policy-related” jobs by removing them from the federal government’s competitive service and placing them in a new job category, initially called Schedule F and now referred to as Schedule Policy/Career. Such employees lose their right to challenge adverse personnel actions before the Merit Systems Protection Board, while their whistleblower complaints will be investigated by their own agency, rather than the Office of Special Counsel.

The Trump administration had considered converting some 50,000 federal jobs, a senior administration official told reporters Wednesday. Instead, the president chose to focus on "the most senior-level career policy officials," an OPM spokesperson said.

About 97 percent of the affected workers are GS-15s or senior leaders, the official said. Among them are agency office and division heads; C-suite leaders such as chief information officers; regional officers and their deputies and chiefs of staff; program managers; people who help write federal regulations; attorneys who craft agency or internal policies; as well as advisors, senior HR officials, and grantmaking posts.

The White House's list of affected positions includes ones at the departments of Defense, State, and Homeland Security.

Trump first ordered such conversions in October 2020, but after he lost his re-election bid, his executive order was left unimplemented. President Biden rescinded the edict, and in 2024 the Office of Personnel Management issued new regulations to make it more difficult to revive the idea.

Soon after Trump took office for the second time, administration officials suggested he could simply “nullify” those regulations. But OPM ultimately followed the notice-and-comment process to propose new regulations to unwind the Biden-era protections and implement Schedule F ideas as Schedule Policy/Career. OPM’s final rule implementing the new job category took effect in March.

The policy remains the subject of multiple lawsuits by federal employee unions, who have accused the administration of violating the Constitution, the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, and the Administrative Procedures Act. Good-government groups have warned that at-will employment of public employees in state government has sometimes reduced productivity while increasing reports of political and personal favoritism in the workplace.

On Wednesday, OPM chief Scott Kupor and another official rejected warnings that the measure would give rise to a new spoils system in federal employment. They said the hiring process would remain unchanged, without political litmus tests.

They did not mention that OPM added politicized essay questions to the federal hiring process more than a year ago. 

“In order to effect the president’s policy priorities, we need people in these senior positions willing and capable of carrying out those directives,” Kupor said. “All this does is basically say: it doesn’t matter what your political views are–and you can have any political views–but if you allow them to interfere in your willingness to carry out lawful orders and directives, this is a mechanism for you to be removed, effectively at-will…There are zero loyalty tests in this.”

On Tuesday, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., asked Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., to press the White House to reverse the appointment of Pulte, who has no national-security background but does have a record of targeting Trump’s political adversaries. Warner said the appointment could sink a deal to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to a person familiar with the matter. 

Punchbowl News first reported Warner’s request to Thune.

Section 702, which allows the NSA and other spy agencies to collect communications of foreigners abroad without a warrant, has long been controversial because Americans’ communications are sometimes swept up in the process. Although the intelligence community insists that the program is key to national security, many lawmakers remain dubious. Efforts to reauthorize the program has produced only short-term renewals, the latest of which will expire on June 12.

Warner has been one of the key Democratic negotiators in FISA talks, and was involved in a recent arrangement with Thune and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., that cleared the way for a 45-day short-term extension of the authority. That deal included a commitment to declassify a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion, a key demand of civil-liberties advocates. 

But the status of that declassification process is unclear. Last month, Wyden said the Trump administration was ignoring the request.

GOP leaders are unlikely to pass an extension alone. Several Republican senators are expected to oppose any FISA deal, meaning Thune will need Democratic votes to move the bill through the Senate. The high chamber could hold an initial procedural vote on a Section 702 extension as soon as Thursday. 

The emerging deal includes provisions meant to win over skeptical lawmakers, including a three-year ban on a central bank digital currency and language barring the FBI from using Section 702 information to prosecute U.S. persons. It stops short of including a full warrant requirement for queries of U.S. person data collected under the program, a measure long sought by the civil liberties community.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who previously served as the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told House lawmakers Wednesday that he had never heard Pulte’s name during his time on the panel. 

Thune also appeared to acknowledge broader concern about the appointment, telling reporters Tuesday that “we don’t need a weaponized DNI.” If the White House tried to nominate Pulte permanently, Thune added, he would have “a lengthy road ahead of him” to win confirmation.

Thune then referred questions about Pulte to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., who told reporters he had “no observations on the matter.”

Over the last several months, the FISA fight has intersected with broader anxieties about domestic surveillance, immigration enforcement and whether emerging artificial intelligence tools could give agencies more powerful ways to analyze large amounts of sensitive personal data.

Section 702, enacted in 2008, codified parts of the once-secret Stellarwind surveillance program created under the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. In 2013, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden disclosed documents detailing how the authority was used, fueling a global debate over privacy and mass surveillance.

The program is frequently used to track national-security threats, including hackers, terrorist groups and foreign intelligence operatives.