Tensions Simmer Over Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Favorite Dealmaker

In a White House that prizes spectacle, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has mastered the art of the announcement. But behind the scenes, his habit of jumping into complex projects and claiming the win has created growing resentment among other officials irritated at having to clean up the details once the cameras are off.

Lutnick, a New York businessman and longtime friend of the president, has spent the better part of last year executing the kind of last-minute dealmaking that creates the headlines President Donald Trump loves. Even some of his internal critics concede he brings the energy to get the deal.

Now, though, Lutnick finds himself facing bipartisan calls for his resignation after his name surfaced in files about the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and even frustration from Trump himself about how much Lutnick’s family has been profiting off their association with the president’s brand.

Plus, some Cabinet secretaries and senior officials in the administration are increasingly wary of what they describe as his brash and controlling style – and whether he can deliver on the $18 trillion in pledged investments Trump claims he’s promised, according to 15 people interviewed for this article, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations.

“The reality is that only a small fraction of that [promised sum] has any specifics behind it and can really be considered new investment. So the rest of it is just repackaged stuff that they were already going to do, or stuff that’s related to the AI boom and has almost nothing to do with tariffs,” said Scott Lincicome, the vice president of general economics at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute.

Lutnick’s ability to ink deals has helped keep him in the president’s good graces and while most interviewed for this article don’t believe his job is in jeopardy, a failure to deliver might give his myriad critics the ammo they need to sideline him. It could also crater a key pillar of Trump’s second term: Bringing in an unprecedented amount of new investment, from energy to pharmaceuticals. Beyond calling that strategy into question, it could also embolden countries and businesses to abandon their own pledges.

“If we’re sitting here in three years and the investment data show a really modest bump in domestic investment outside of the AI boom, then it’ll be a significant black mark against the tariff record and Lutnick himself to the extent that he’s the engineer of all of it,” said Lincicome.

When asked for comment about POLITICO’s reporting, White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement that Trump “maintains complete confidence in Secretary Lutnick because he has been the most transformative Commerce Secretary in modern history and is a champion of the President’s America First trade and tariffs policies.”

“Fabricated smears from anonymous sources don’t change the fact that Secretary Lutnick played a key role helping President Trump secure historic trade deals with the European Union and Japan as well as a $250 billion investment deal with Taiwan,” he said.

A person close to Lutnick said the Commerce secretary “meets regularly with top tech CEOs to ensure they are on track with their investments to America, and will use the power of tariffs if they’re not on track both against the companies and the countries.”

Beyond concerns about substance, Lutnick’s tendency to centralize power has alienated some colleagues, while others complain that he leaves no room for differing views.

“No one’s allowed to talk to the interagency without Howard giving explicit approval,” an administration official said. “Even when his staff show up to meetings at the White House, they’re under a gag order, and they literally just say, ‘Hi, I don’t have a position from the Secretary on this, so Commerce has no position at this time.’”

One former Trump administration official described some meetings he attended where Lutnick shouted down dissenting views.

“When you’re in a meeting with him, if he disagrees with what you’re saying, or if you are trying to offer, even diplomatically, an alternative view, he just completely shouts over you,” the official said, recalling one tense discussion about trade rules last year.

Three people – the first administration official and two others familiar with the matter – said, based on conversations with others in the administration, Commerce appears to be experiencing higher-than-typical departure rates for political appointees, with some people blaming Commerce’s work culture at its political level for why they’re leaving.

Desai disputed the idea that Commerce is experiencing more departures than is typical, saying in a statement that Commerce “has one of the lowest staff turnover rates of any major agency one year into the Trump administration.”

Lutnick during the transition

According to three other current and former officials, Lutnick’s troubles didn’t begin with his approach to the trade deals or Epstein headlines. They began at Mar-a-Lago, where Lutnick and other members of Trump’s senior staff and allies decamped shortly after Trump’s 2024 election win to pick Trump’s Cabinet and top political appointees.

Lutnick played an outsized role in helping assemble the Cabinet, including making sweeping assurances to prospective secretaries that they would have broad latitude to hire trusted allies, according to the three people, including one current administration official who worked on the transition who heard Lutnick make the commitments first hand.

“He indicated [that] without even thinking about the vetting ramifications,” said the official with direct knowledge. “This is a total outsider, and it was his show for a while, and he kind of thought he could do whatever he wanted,” the official said.
Those promises quickly ran into reality, after former White House Presidential Personnel Office Director Sergio Gor instituted stringent loyalty tests that sidelined many experienced candidates, including some favored by Cabinet members. (Gor is now serving as U.S. ambassador to India.)

The person close to Lutnick denied this happened, saying the transition had a thorough vetting process for all levels of staff.

Lutnick lost a battle for Treasury secretary to Scott Bessent.

The Oval Office regular 

Once Trump returned to office, Lutnick was a near constant presence at the White House.

“Howard, for a while, didn’t know how to not appear all the time,” said the official who had worked on the transition. “Every day he was there getting into the Oval, asking to see the president there. You can’t be there all the time. You don’t want to be there all the time. It’s not a good thing.”

Five Trump administration officials – four current and one former – interviewed for this article described a dynamic in which Lutnick would insert himself into negotiations of all kinds that are already underway, sometimes accelerating them, sometimes complicating them.

“Lutnick is sometimes very helpful and sometimes an annoyance,” one of the current officials said. “There are some issues where if you get close alignment with him, it can be very effective in doing things and driving things forward.” But, the official added, “a ton of issues – so many things that you need Commerce to move on – they won’t move until Lutnick signs off on it, even for kind of routine decisions, and it just has a lot of friction. … In terms of the general workings, there’s a ton of frustration with how things are running at Commerce across not just the White House, but the broader interagency.”

One White House official close to agency decisionmaking said the White House often has to wait for Commerce to do their part of interagency tasks, and said it’s largely due to Lutnick and his tendency to centralize decisionmaking. Asked about potential delays, Desai denied that Commerce “is a particular laggard,” adding: “Sometimes they’re slower than ideal, sometimes they’re much faster. As with every other agency and component.”

Over time, Lutnick developed a reputation for jumping into deals on subjects on which he has little expertise and not enforcing follow through with companies and countries compared to the other trade heavyweight U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, according to four current and former administration officials and allies. The difference in how the two men operate is so stark that foreign governments are being informally encouraged by Trump administration officials to negotiate with Lutnick instead of with Greer, the people said.

“Jamieson is a professional and he knows what countries need to give up to get market access for American companies,” the first administration official said. “And Lutnick just chases a headline. And so if he thinks there’s a headline, he can seize quick victory.”

A Commerce spokesperson said in a statement: “At President Trump’s direction, Secretary Lutnick has delivered important wins for the American people, including negotiating a stake in Intel, securing the U.S. Steel Golden Share, bringing manufacturing back to American soil where construction has already begun, and securing over $550 billion in investment from Japan, with projects now actively underway.”

“Secretary Lutnick is relentlessly focused on delivering for the American people, securing trillions of dollars in investment, delivering historic trade deals, and fighting for the American worker,” the spokesperson said.

A U.S. Trade Representative spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

That perception has had consequences. According to three administration officials, some in the White House are beginning to try to keep Lutnick out of some administration projects that already have momentum because he might hijack it and try to take credit for a deal that may not ultimately achieve the end goal.

“People will use the phrase there are ‘too many cooks in the kitchen,’ to keep Howard out,” an administration official said. “What they mean is don’t let Howard in the kitchen.”

The Westinghouse deal 

A deal the administration struck with Westinghouse Electric Co. offers something of a case study in Lutnick’s operating style.

The Department of Energy had spent months building a broader nuclear strategy and negotiating a deal with Westinghouse to help increase America’s nuclear energy capacity when Lutnick arrived and took it over last summer, according to another three administration officials familiar with the deal. Lutnick began negotiating directly with Westinghouse, catching Energy Secretary Chris Wright by surprise, two of the officials said.

In a statement to POLITICO, Wright called Lutnick “a tremendous partner in advancing the president’s energy dominance agenda and delivering for the American people” who has helped secure “transformational commitments for investments that are restoring American energy leadership and driving economic growth across the country.” Wright did not directly address questions about whether he was upset with Lutnick over the Westinghouse deal.

In late October, the Commerce Department unveiled a splashy agreement with Westinghouse, framing it as a monumental step toward rebuilding American nuclear capacity. On the surface, the eye-popping $80 billion framework for potential Japanese purchase of at least 10 large-scale reactors looked like a classic win for Trump, who has been pushing to meet America’s surging energy demands in part by increasing nuclear capacity.

In a statement, Westinghouse said it’s “working to deliver on the Administration’s plan to build a fleet of large nuclear reactors with the AP1000® plant – the only construction-ready, gigawatt-scale, advanced modular reactor that is fully licensed and operating in the U.S.” A spokesperson added that the company and its partners are “prepared to start nuclear construction at scale in the United States, supporting tens of thousands of high-paying, highly skilled American jobs and delivering more than $92 billion in U.S. GDP.”

“The moment the deal was signed with Japan, Secretary Lutnick invited Secretary Wright to talk about the deal. They’ve continued to work together,” a person close to Lutnick said.

But to Lutnick’s critics, it was an example of Lutnick closing a deal with few details and without ensuring that the nuclear reactors get built properly. Westinghouse has built the only two new nuclear reactors in the U.S. over the last three decades, but the project was $18 billion over budget and seven years behind schedule, which contributed to Westinghouse’s eventual bankruptcy filing.

“Nobody knows how much it’s going to cost to actually build a reactor,” the administration official said.

From that vantage point, the Westinghouse framework was “very high-level, very pie in the sky,” the official argued – long on ambition, short on the mechanics of cost certainty, labor constraints and project execution.

“The initial deal warped incentive structures in a way that was not conducive to our goal of putting new nuclear capacity into operation and getting large reactors built right,” the second administration official said.

But the second official argued that Lutnick’s “act now, details later” stance ultimately proved beneficial, as the administration was able to increase competition in the space by engaging with other companies that produce nuclear reactors after the first deal. That includes GE Hitachi, the joint venture between the U.S. energy behemoth GE Vernova and the Japanese industrial heavyweight Hitachi. “But over time, this has evolved, and now we’re in a better position than we would have been had the deal not come about,” the official said.

The family business problem

Complicating Lutnick’s standing is his family’s expanding financial footprint during Trump’s second term – a fact that hasn’t escaped Trump’s notice.

Lutnick stepped into government from Cantor Fitzgerald, where his sons, Brandon and Kyle, have taken controlling roles. The firm has had a blockbuster year amid a surge of major transactions. It posted revenues of $2.5 billion in 2025, up 25 percent from the previous year.

The president has been upset that Lutnick’s family is profiting so aggressively off of his popularity and he confronted Lutnick directly about it during an episode at Mar-a-Lago over the winter holiday, said two people familiar with the exchange, one of whom witnessed it.

“There definitely is this thing where a lot of people in business… just want to do deals with whoever is closer to the administration,” one of the officials said.

One of the officials familiar with Trump’s thinking said the president reacts viscerally when someone else profits off of what Trump considers his own brand – even though he may personally like the person.

Desai and the Commerce spokesperson did not respond when asked about the Mar-a-Lago episode.

A Cantor Fitzgerald spokesperson said the company’s “growth across Cantor, BGC, and Newmark is not an overnight success, but as a result of having the foresight over many years to invest in capabilities and talent to support clients’ evolving needs in high growth sectors.” (Cantor Fitzgerald has controlling stakes in brokerage and financial technology company BGC and commercial real estate advisory Newmark.)

Then came Epstein 

Two weeks ago, Lutnick faced renewed questions about his past relationship with Epstein, his former neighbor, after the release of records and Lutnick’s own testimony acknowledging a 2012 trip to Epstein’s island after he previously claimed to have severed ties.

“We had lunch on the island – that is true – for an hour, and we left with all of my children, with my nannies and my wife all together. We were on family vacation,” Lutnick said at a congressional hearing earlier this month.

Lutnick’s critics seized on the news to argue that he’s a distraction at a moment when Trump wants his economic team focused on delivery. Lutnick has not been accused of a crime in association with Epstein.

And if they hoped it would kick Lutnick from his beachhead in the Trump administration, Lutnick doesn’t appear to be going anywhere – so far.

Lutnick threw a party at his Washington mansion earlier this month, attended by six members of Trump’s Cabinet, senior White House officials and a handful of Republican members of Congress. Last week Trump gave Lutnick a shout-out and praised his “good ideas,” calling him “a very very successful guy.” And he’s been on at least two Air Force One rides with the president since the new revelations about his trip to Epstein’s island.

“He is thumbing a middle finger to anyone who thinks he’s on the outs because the president has really given a lot of his Cabinet the assurance that they’re not going anywhere until he wants them to go somewhere,” the person close to the White House said.