A Wednesday analysis from ABC News has uncovered that defense-linked companies with financial backing from Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, sons of U.S. President Donald Trump, have accumulated more than $6 billion in federal procurement contracts from the U.S. Department of Defense, triggering fierce backlash over allegations of public office abuse and self-dealing.
The web of investments at the center of the report is routed through 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm launched in 2023 by prominent pro-Trump donors, which brought Trump Jr. on board as a formal partner in 2024. One of the most high-profile recent deals came earlier this week, when the Trump administration announced a multibillion-dollar funding arrangement with Anduril Industries, an artificial intelligence-focused defense contractor. 1789 Capital acquired a $2.5 billion stake in Anduril more than a year before the announcement.
The report details a pattern of contract awards closely following the Trump sons’ involvement with emerging defense and aerospace firms. Last year, Unusual Machines, a Florida-based producer of drone components, secured a contract to manufacture motors for the U.S. Army, a deal that came just months after the firm named Trump Jr. as a senior advisor. Earlier in 2025, Powerus, another drone technology company that lists both Trump sons as direct investors, received a purchase order of undisclosed value from the U.S. Air Force. Neither Unusual Machines nor Powerus had ever been awarded a U.S. government contract before the Trump brothers joined their stakeholder rosters.
Additional examples cited in the analysis include Vulcan Elements, a startup focused on rare earth magnet production that counts 1789 Capital among its backers, which received a $620 million low-interest loan from the Pentagon in 2024. In April 2025, Foundation Future Industries, a military robotics startup that appointed Eric Trump as its chief strategy advisor, was awarded a $24 million Pentagon procurement contract. Shortly after the award was made public, Eric Trump publicly told Fox Business that the contract would help the U.S. “win” the global technological race with China to develop deployable battle-ready robotic systems.
A spokesperson for Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump pushed back against the implications of the ABC report, defending the pair’s business activities. “They are experienced business leaders who have built and invested in businesses across a wide range of industries for decades, long before their father first ran for public office,” the spokesperson said. “Their investment decisions are based solely on their independent business judgment and personal convictions, and they do not seek to influence, direct, or participate in any government decision, procurement, award, regulatory action, or other governmental process. Attempts to portray their ordinary investment activities as improper are a deliberate distortion of the facts.”
Despite this denial, critics across the political spectrum have decried the string of contracts as a historic case of public corruption. The official social media account for House Democrats wrote, “Donald Trump and his sons have raked in BILLIONS while Americans struggle to make ends meet. Let’s call this what it is: blatant corruption and an abuse of power.”
Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews, argued that congressional Democrats should leverage their control over federal spending to block funding for deals tied to the Trump family’s business interests. “Corruption of this kind is why the Democrats need to freeze or cut back US defense spending if they take control of Congress,” O’Brien posted on social media. “If you actually care about US security, funding this is destructive.”
Mark Jacob, former metro editor at the Chicago Tribune, characterized the pattern of awards as anything but accidental. “Pentagon contracts for the Trump-linked firms were not a coincidence, but deep corruption that never would have tolerated before a convicted felon took over the White House,” Jacob wrote.
Sarah Longwell, a veteran Republican pollster who left the GOP over its alignment with Trump, echoed those criticisms, saying the cumulative value of the contracts confirms that “the president of the United States and his family are insanely, unprecedentedly corrupt.”
This reporting was originally published by Common Dreams.