After previously warning she would introduce legislation to “rein in corruption through presidential library donations,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren is leading the charge with a group of Democrat lawmakers on the Presidential Library Anti-Corruption Act of 2025.
The bill, which is aimed at closing loopholes allowing for unchecked donations to presidential libraries, is co-sponsored by Senators Angela Alsobrooks, Richard Blumenthal, Dick Durbin, Crhis Van Hollen, Andy Kim, Ed Markey, Jeff Merkley, Alex Padilla, Gary Peters, Jack Reed, Bernie Sanders, Sheldon Whitehouse, Adam Schiff and Ron Wyden. Reps. Jared Moskowitz, Melanie Stansbury, Jamie Raskin, Andre Carson, Emmanuel Cleaver, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Dwight Evans, Hank Johnson, Dave Min, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Frank Pallone and Nikema Williams (D-Ga.) are also co-sponsors.
The legislation would require presidents to wait until after leaving office before fundraising or accepting donations, except for 501(c)(3) organizations who would be limited to a contribution cap of $10,000 total. It would also prohibit donations from foreign nationals or foreign governments, registered lobbyists, federal contractors, and individuals seeking presidential pardons for two years after a president leaves office.
Additionally, it would prohibit straw donations, in which someone makes a donation under someone else’s name, ban the use of presidential library donations for personal expenses or unrelated financial obligations, and require all donations of $200 or more to be disclosed to the National Archives each calendar quarter during the president’s time in office and five years after. Donor information, including name, employer, and date and amount of the donation, would be published online in a searchable, downloadable format.
“This boils down to a simple question: Who does the government work for?” Warren said during a call with reporters on Wednesday. “We believe it works for the American people.”
A White House spokesperson did not immediately return TheWrap’s request for comment on the proposed legislation.
A new analysis released by Warren found that companies have pledged to funnel at least $63 million into Trump’s future presidential library.
Among them are Paramount, which agreed to settle a lawsuit over its Oct. 7 “60 Minutes” interview with former vice president Kamala Harris for $16 million, and Disney, which paid $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit Trump brought against ABC News and star anchor George Stephanopoulos.
Warren’s report also cites Meta, which paid $25 million – including a $22 million library donation per the Wall Street Journal – to settle Trump’s lawsuit about being kicked off Facebook and Instagram after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and X, which paid $10 million to settle a similar suit.
Additionally she called out other gifts and in-kind donations, including a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar, expensive candlelight dinners at Mar-a-Lago, leftover inauguration donations, and more. Together, she says the gifts for Trump’s library are worth at least half a billion dollars.
Though she acknowledged that past presidents, including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, have also accepted suspicion donations while in office, Warren argued Trump is “doing so at a magnitude that makes glaringly clear the need for common-sense guardrails.”
During the press call, Stansbury said Trump’s acceptance of the Qatari plane mirrored “one of the key plot devices in House of Cards,” adding that it “does lead one to wonder if Mr. Donald Trump is getting his idea for corruption from TV shows.”
Passage of the bill will likely be an uphill battle, as Moskowitz said there are “no Republicans I am aware of” in the House who want to sign on as sponsors. Blumenthal similarly said there were not yet GOP backers in the Senate, adding that “Republicans have demonstrated absolutely no backbone at all, or in any way sponsoring legislation that could be interpreted, in the most expansive way, as implying the slightest degree of criticism of Donald Trump.”
The plans to formally introduce legislation comes after Warren slammed Paramount’s settlement with Trump, warning it could be “bribery in plain sight” to secure regulatory approval of its pending $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. The deal is under review with the Federal Communications Commission due to a required transfer of broadcast licenses. Paramount and the FCC have previously argued that the settlement is unrelated to the Skydance merger.
At the time, she said that the media giant had refused to provide answers to a congressional inquiry and that she was calling for a “full investigation into whether or not any anti-bribery laws were broken.” She added that the Trump administration’s level of sheer corruption is appalling and Paramount should be ashamed of putting its profits over independent journalism.”
Other lawmakers who called out the Paramount settlement were Wyden, who said he’d be “first in line calling for federal charges” when Democrats retake power and encouraged state prosecutors to make “corporate execs who sold out our democracy answer in court,” and Sanders, who said the Paramount settlement sets “an extremely dangerous precedent in terms of both the First Amendment and government extortion” and “will only embolden Trump to continue attacking.”
Markey and Senator Ben Ray Luján have also said the settlement has “cast a shadow” over the Skydance deal and that it “raises serious questions” about Paramount’s rationale and its implications for media independence. They have called on the FCC to hold a full committee vote on the Skydance merger and said the agency owes the public a “transparent, deliberative process on such a high-profile and controversial issue.”
