For many government employees, merely owning cryptocurrency is off-limits. Not for Trump, who created a “very grifty” meme coin.

When Tulsi Gabbard filed ethics paperwork to serve as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, she promised to sell her holdings of bitcoin, Cronos, Ethereum, and Solana cryptocurrencies. For decades, such pledges have been a routine part of the standard government hiring process. Congress passed a law in 1962 criminalizing conflicts of interest, and the Office of Government Ethics singled out cryptocurrencies as a concern in 2022.

But the ethics rules restricting the members of his administration who could sway the price of crypto don’t apply to President Donald Trump.

Before his inauguration, Trump cashed in on his election win with a meme coin, signaling the beginning of a new era as crypto companies push the government to allow financial regulators to get in on crypto trading themselves.

Even if that does not come to pass, one ethics watchdog said he already had grave concerns about Trump selling meme coins at the same time that he appoints the heads of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

“If you’ve got a direct, personal financial connection to the crypto industries, there’s a self-interested motivation to create the easiest possible path for the crypto world,” said Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, the director of government affairs at the Project on Government Oversight.

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