Democrats Gear Up For Offensive Against Trump’s Treasury

Democratic lawmakers spent the past two years in the minority clashing with President Donald Trump’s top financial officials. If they take back power in Congress after next month’s midterms, expect an all-out brawl, especially with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

The Democrats who would lead the committees overseeing the Treasury Department and IRS are preparing to investigate Trump’s alleged self-enrichment schemes and efforts to dismantle regulatory agencies, according to people with direct knowledge of Democrats’ plans granted anonymity to describe them.

The target list includes the deal the IRS signed off on in May to spare Trump and his family from tax audits; the preliminary approval of a banking charter for an arm of Trump’s cryptocurrency business; the use of tax data to carry out the administration’s mass deportation agenda; and the all-but-dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said the people who were granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Much of that focus will fall on the Treasury and its various agencies, including the IRS and other, more obscure corners that play quiet but pivotal roles in financial regulation. Winning back the House or Senate would give Democrats more staff to launch inquiries — and, critically, subpoena power to demand records and testimony about whether officials used their authority to enrich the president, his family and their business interests.

“There’s a lot of work to do,” said a senior Democratic aide on the Senate Finance Committee. “One of the first priorities will be digging into the corrupt deal to grant Trump and his family blanket immunity from tax audits — essentially a blank check to cheat on his taxes.”

The administration is preparing for the onslaught. Treasury and IRS officials are bracing for a deluge of document demands and other oversight requests, and they’re gearing up for major clashes with Democratic lawmakers, according to a Republican lobbyist in touch with the administration.

Democrats, meanwhile, see oversight as an opportunity to make good on the anti-corruption narrative they’re driving in the closing weeks of the midterm campaign — and to build up a platform to solidify their messaging with an eye on the 2028 presidential race. The POLITICO Poll this week found 41% of respondents saying Trump has used his perch to benefit himself and his family financially.

Emily DiVito — a senior adviser for economic policy at Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive think tank that consults with lawmakers — said that it was important to investigate an exhaustive list of activities within the Treasury Department to root out potential misconduct.

That includes Trump’s audit immunity deal, crypto ventures and defanging of a consumer watchdog, all aligned with Democrats’ broader effort to cast themselves as the party that will act as a check against the president using his office for personal gain and making it easier for wealthy individuals and corporations to avoid taxes. “That looks across the enterprise,” she said.

Personal attacks

Oversight efforts could get ugly: Bessent has been combative with Democrats in the past, using his congressional appearances to lob personal attacks at influential members like Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Rep. Maxine Waters of California and Richard Neal of Massachusetts — the top Democrats on Senate Finance, Senate Banking, House Financial Services and House Ways and Means, respectively. All four did not comment.

A wide range of Democrats sharply criticized the Trump administration’s decision in August to let a cryptocurrency venture backed by Trump’s family into the U.S. banking system. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the bank regulator that’s part of the Treasury Department and led by Trump appointee Jonathan Gould, preliminarily approved the application by an affiliate of World Liberty Financial to become a national trust bank, arguing it met the legal criteria for such bank charters. Trump earned nearly $600 million in World Liberty token and equity sales in 2025, according to his financial disclosures.

Waters, during a hearing last month, accused Bessent of “ignoring the massive conflicts of interest in the Trump family stablecoin and crypto businesses.”

Democrats now are gearing up to scrutinize how the OCC reached its decision to let a World Liberty affiliate operate a bank. They have already blasted the decision as a major conflict of interest, prompting Warren and other Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee to introduce legislation that would bar federal regulators from approving banks owned or controlled by the president or other top officials and their families.

David Wachsman, a spokesperson for World Liberty Financial, said that the company "has complied with all applicable U.S. laws and regulations."

"It's troubling that Congress might baselessly target a compliant company dedicated to expanding access to the U.S. dollar when there are a plethora of issues afflicting the American public that need to be addressed," he said in a statement.

Private sector scrutiny

Democrats may also look beyond the Trump administration for answers about how it’s managing the country’s finances. The Democratic aide on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees the Treasury and IRS, said Wyden may also look to the ultrarich and private companies that have benefited from the administration’s tax policies.

“Senate Democrats will also continue to pursue oversight of schemes and loopholes exploited by the ultrawealthy and corporations to avoid paying taxes they would otherwise owe,” the aide said. “Regular Americans pay their fair share of taxes, Finance Committee Democrats want to make sure Trump and the richest Americans and corporations do the same.”

Similarly, congressional investigations into the decline of the CFPB could rope in companies that the bureau dropped enforcement cases against when Trump took office.

The retreat by the Trump-led CFPB, which has largely been spared from total destruction only thanks to court orders, has benefited a wide range of companies across the financial industry, including credit reporting agencies, big banks, tech companies and other lenders. That’s because the acting director, Russ Vought, has dropped lawsuits, scuttled investigations and scaled back on the agency’s supervision of companies.

‘A little mini law firm’

Spokespeople for the Treasury and IRS declined requests for comment, though Bessent, in a recent interview with 2Way, dismissed Democrats’ previous questioning of him during hearings as “a lot more noise than signal.” The OCC did not respond to a request for comment.

Still, periods of intense scrutiny from a Congress led by the opposition party have, in the past, upended agency operations.

Democratic probes of the Treasury Department and IRS as intense as some of the investigations Republicans launched during the Obama administration — when the agencies were accused of delaying or denying tax-exempt status for conservative groups — could impair services ordinary Americans rely on, like phone support with tax agents.

That GOP-led oversight, which made headlines for weeks in 2013, prompted the IRS to pull more than 100 attorneys from their day jobs to review and redact emails and other records lawmakers subpoenaed. They also were subject to taxpayer privacy laws, said Joe Rillotta, who was an IRS counselor and congressional liaison at the time.

“It was like a little mini law firm,” he said. “The demand on the Service was such that we had to have a lot of people full time responding to these congressional inquiries.”

“As attorneys who weren’t working with those components every day, we had to familiarize ourselves with that so we could make a coherent production of documents and information to the Hill,” Rillotta added.

“Every person hour that’s working to get ready for a congressional hearing is a person hour not spent making our tax forms more plain language or answering that next phone call,” Danny Werfel, a Biden-era IRS commissioner who also led the agency in an acting capacity in 2013, said.