In a Trump administration that will include millionaires and billionaires, CIA nominee Mike Pompeo has a financial disclosure form that looks more like an average American’s.
The three-term Republican congressman from Kansas submitted an eight-page document detailing his finances to the Justice Department, as required of nominees.
That’s significantly shorter than the forms submitted by secretary of transportation nominee Elaine Chao, at 17 pages, and secretary of state nominee Rex Tillerson, at 38 pages.
Pompeo has an Individual Retirement Account, a couple of mutual funds, a checking account, a life insurance policy and a 30-year mortgage on his home, all modest by comparison with his peers in the incoming administration.
He reported no gifts or travel reimbursements, nor any source of compensation exceeding $5,000 a year. (His $174,000 House of Representatives base salary doesn’t count.)
Pompeo lacks the kind of large-scale financial interests that could create conflict for other members of the Cabinet. Still, like other nominees, he signed an ethics agreement that states in part that he will not “participate personally and substantially in any particular matter in which I know that I have a financial interest directly and predictably affected by the matter.”
Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil CEO, has $50 million in stock options, according to his financial disclosure, and will receive a $180 million retirement package from the company.
Chao, a former labor secretary who’s married to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, serves on several corporate boards, including News Corp, Wells Fargo, Ingersoll Rand and Vulcan Materials.
Her director fees total hundreds of thousands of dollars, and she’ll receive likely hundreds of thousands more in deferred compensation from those companies when she leaves.
If confirmed by the Senate, Pompeo’s $185,100 a year salary at CIA will be only about $10,000 more than his base salary as a member of Congress.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is scheduled to take up his nomination on Thursday.
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Pompeo’s estimated personal assets of $345,000 in 2014 ranked him No. 311 out of 435 House members, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. He ranked third out of the four members of the House from Kansas at that time.
Pompeo has some company at the lower end of the wealth spectrum: Environmental Protection Agency nominee Scott Pruitt submitted a financial disclosure form only one page longer. Pruitt, currently Oklahoma’s attorney general, would make the same salary at EPA as Pompeo would at CIA.
The top salary for Trump’s Cabinet appointees is $205,700 a year. That’s what the secretaries of defense, state, treasury, commerce, labor, and so forth, would receive.
Curtis Tate: 202-383-6018, @tatecurtis