Howard Lutnick
Howard Lutnick is the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, in office since 2025, and previously led the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald. Entries naming him record departmental decisions on export controls and trade, and his conduct of official communications. His entries sit largely in self-dealing and pay-to-play categories rather than in a policy area.
2026 Events (3)
FOIA showed Rubio, Hegseth, Caine, Vance and Lutnick kept using auto-deleting Signal chats after Trump's Signalgate warning
A State Department FOIA release obtained through Democracy Forward's litigation revealed 13 previously undisclosed Signal group chats used by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine, Vice President JD Vance, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick for government business, configured with auto-delete timers as short as eight hours. The chats ran from April through June 2025, after President Trump's April 24, 2025 public acknowledgment that officials should stop using Signal following the original Signalgate incident.
Commerce Department directed NOAA to review California's coastal program after the state delayed oil, pipeline, and spaceport projects
On June 26, 2026, the U.S. Department of Commerce directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to conduct a formal evaluation of California's federally approved Coastal Management Program under the Coastal Zone Management Act. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who requested the review in a May letter to the White House National Economic Council, said state policies delaying "critical national infrastructure in the name of environmental extremism are unacceptable." The review could alter federal funding to the state if California is found out of compliance.
Commerce Department forces Anthropic to disable two AI models for all foreign nationals in a first-of-its-kind export-control order
On June 12, 2026, the U.S. Department of Commerce — in a letter from Secretary Howard Lutnick to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei — issued an export-control directive citing national-security authorities that suspended all access to Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models by any foreign national, inside or outside the United States, including the company's own foreign-national employees. To comply, Anthropic abruptly disabled both models for all customers worldwide; its other models were unaffected. The government's stated basis was a belief that a method of "jailbreaking" Fable 5 existed, though the letter gave no details; Anthropic said the cited technique surfaced only minor, previously known vulnerabilities also found in other public models and disputed that it justified recalling a model used by hundreds of millions. Contemporaneous reporting described the order as the first time the U.S. government has forced a leading American AI company to take a publicly deployed model offline.
2025 Events (2)
Trump and Lutnick sons held Kaz Resources stake as their fathers brokered a $1.6B U.S.-backed Kazakhstan tungsten deal
On November 6, 2025, the U.S. government announced a deal with Kazakhstan granting a U.S.-backed company, Kaz Resources, access to one of the world's largest undeveloped tungsten resources, supported by up to $1.6 billion in financing from the Export-Import Bank and the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation. Six days before the announcement, investors linked to Dominari Securities — a firm partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump and based at Trump Tower — had acquired a 20 percent stake in the entity connected to the Kazakhstan project; Cantor Fitzgerald, run by Howard Lutnick's sons, separately raised $210 million for a related vehicle. A June 2026 New York Times investigation found that at least 14 companies affiliated with the Trump or Lutnick families were actively working with the federal government on critical-minerals deals worth more than $8.9 billion in federal support.
Commerce Secretary Lutnick urged Fox News viewers to buy Tesla stock as Musk led DOGE
During a March 19, 2025 Fox News appearance, in which he was identified on screen by his official title, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick urged viewers to buy Tesla stock as the company's shares slid amid backlash over CEO Elon Musk's role leading the Department of Government Efficiency. Federal ethics rules bar executive-branch officials from using their office or title to endorse a product or company. Within 48 hours, a House Oversight Committee ranking member opened an investigation and the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint, each citing the same rule.