Schumer Proposes New Federal Anti-Corruption Bureau, Cites Trump's $2 Billion in Crypto Earnings

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer introduced a bill Thursday to create a federal agency built to investigate corruption in the executive branch. He's calling it the Anti-Corruption Bureau Creation Act, and he's citing Donald Trump's crypto business as the reason it's needed.

Schumer unveiled the bill at a Public Citizen event in Washington called "Combating Corruption," describing it as the "biggest, boldest and broadest proposal ever put forward to revitalize our anti-corruption institutions." Democratic Sens. Alex Padilla, Andy Kim, and Jeff Merkley signed on as co-sponsors, according to Ground News.

What the bill actually does

The legislation would fold three existing watchdogs, the Office of Government Ethics, the Federal Election Commission, and the Office of Special Counsel, into one bureau with subpoena power, according to reporting cited from The Washington Post. Schumer said combining them ends a "broken patchwork" of agencies that weren't built to handle a moment like this one.

The new bureau would have seven board members, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, capped at three from each party with one nonpartisan seat. It would get independent, self-sustaining funding, similar to how the Federal Reserve is funded, specifically so a sitting president couldn't starve it of money or control it politically.

It would also keep the power to investigate a president after he leaves office, according to news.meaww.com. That's a direct response to complaints that federal investigations into a former president tend to lose momentum once he's out of the White House.

On the citizen-suit side, the bill borrows a structure from the False Claims Act. Individual citizens and state attorneys general could sue to recover money Schumer says was "stolen from the public through government corruption." Larger, more severe cases would get priority to keep frivolous suits from clogging the system, Schumer said.

The bill would also cap gifts. Presidents, vice presidents, their spouses and adult children, and senior administration officials would be barred from accepting gifts worth more than $50,000, according to the Post's reporting.

The numbers Schumer is using

Schumer's core argument is financial. He said Trump disclosed earning more than $2 billion in 2025, including $1.4 billion tied to crypto ventures, according to Cointelegraph's review of the bill's text. Separately, Schumer said Trump has personally taken in "at least $2.2 billion" since returning to office 18 months ago, and that the Trump family combined has made "at least $4 billion" in that span.

Federal filings reviewed by Ground News put Trump's crypto business revenue, including ventures like World Liberty Financial, at nearly $1.2 billion last year. Schumer also cited a Brennan Center poll finding 92% of voters see corruption as a major problem in government, and claimed Trump's policies have cost ordinary Americans at least $3,100 in higher costs.

None of these figures have been independently verified by a neutral auditor in the sourcing available, and the White House did not respond when Cointelegraph asked for comment on the bill.

The pushback, and the obvious math problem

Schumer built in a specific answer to the most predictable criticism: that a future Democratic president could weaponize this same bureau against political rivals. He said the bill "explicitly prohibits weaponizing the bureau" and asked rhetorically, "What if Trump tries to commandeer it to go after his political opponents? This would come at a steep price."

Any agency with subpoena power over the executive branch, run by political appointees even with bipartisan caps, creates real risk of being turned into a weapon depending on who controls the confirmation process and who sits in the nonpartisan seat. The bill's design tries to guard against that with the party caps and independent funding, but whether those guardrails actually hold up under a determined administration of either party is untested, because the agency doesn't exist yet.

The bigger problem for Schumer is arithmetic. Republicans control the Senate and the House. This bill has zero GOP co-sponsors named in any of the reporting. There's no realistic path for it to pass this Congress, making it a messaging document aimed at framing Trump's crypto profits ahead of the 2026 midterms.

The event itself got derailed before Schumer could finish. According to the New York Post, a self-described "journalist" in the front row interrupted Schumer's remarks at the National Press Club, calling him a "genocidal maniac" and shouting "Show your genocidal face" before Schumer could complete his announcement. The heckling became its own story, overshadowing the policy rollout in at least some of the day's coverage.

Schumer's bill also lands in the middle of an unresolved fight over the CLARITY Act, the crypto market-structure bill moving through Congress. The White House agreed to some ethics provisions in that bill, but Cointelegraph reported many Democrats say those provisions don't go far enough to address Trump's financial stake in the industry he'd be regulating. Whether that dispute sinks or reshapes CLARITY is still an open question heading into the fall session.