Ten days before President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the cloud computing company Citrix Systems Inc. joined the unprecedented flood of corporate interests seeking to ingratiate themselves with the new president by contributing $1 million to his inaugural committee, the same amount that Amazon, Meta, and so many more companies gave. 

Unlike most of those other companies, however, the CEO of Citrix’s parent company would soon gain extraordinary access to the Treasury Department’s inner workings as part of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts. On January 23, 2025, just thirteen days after Citrix’s $1 million contribution, Tom Krause, the CEO of Citrix parent company Cloud Software Group, started working at Treasury as both the senior advisor for technology and modernization and as the DOGE team lead at the agency. 

Krause has since been delegated the duties of the fiscal assistant secretary and now oversees the Treasury payment system that disburses more than $5 trillion annually. Krause was placed in the role after a career official retired in the wake of resisting Krause’s DOGE team’s ultimately successful effort to gain access to the payment systems. According to the New York Times, Krause initially sought access soon after joining the Trump administration in order to freeze outgoing payments authorized by the U.S. Agency for International Development, an early DOGE target.

At the same time that Krause assumed a position at the heart of the government’s financial operations he maintained his position as CEO of Cloud Software Group. As Krause described in a February 11, 2025 declaration filed in litigation challenging the DOGE team’s access to the Treasury payment systems, he is serving as a special government employee and the Treasury Department’s ethics office has purportedly determined that it is “permissible” for him to continue in his private sector role while working in the government. 

As CREW recently explained in an analysis of DOGE’s operations, special government employees are temporary or intermittent employees who are typically brought into the federal government to provide issue-specific expertise or to serve on federal advisory committees. Though they do have to abide by certain ethics rules, special government employees can avoid compliance with anti-corruption and transparency measures that would otherwise apply to full-time government employees. For instance, they are subject to the Hatch Act, which restricts the political activities of federal employees, but only while they are on duty, whereas full-time employees are subject to several Hatch Act restrictions even while off-duty.

Though there is no public reporting indicating that Citrix’s large inaugural contribution played a particular role in Krause’s entry into a powerful government position, the $1 million donation underscores conflict of interest concerns surrounding Krause. As Wired reported after Krause was named to his Treasury role, his company, which he is still involved in, is connected to millions of dollars worth of federal contracts, including with the Treasury Department. 

After Krause started working at Treasury, he sent an email to Cloud Software Group employees, assuring them that he would not lose sight of their interests while simultaneously serving in government. “Let me be clear – as CEO of Cloud Software Group, I am committed to our company and you, our employees,” Krause wrote. Those split commitments are exactly why ethics experts have raised concerns about Krause’s dual roles. 

Photo by Pinpoint Photography under Creative Commons license

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