{"id":9632,"date":"2025-07-14T17:51:05","date_gmt":"2025-07-14T17:51:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/9632\/"},"modified":"2025-07-14T17:51:05","modified_gmt":"2025-07-14T17:51:05","slug":"afl-cio-report-is-doges-antonio-gracias-mishandling-retiree-investments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/9632\/","title":{"rendered":"AFL-CIO Report: Is DOGE\u2019s Antonio Gracias Mishandling Retiree Investments?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In late May, Elon Musk officially exited the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) amid internal feuds<\/a> over the One Big Beautiful Bill and, importantly, widespread calls<\/a> from his companies\u2019 investors to focus on his day job(s) as CEO. However, as Will Royce wrote for the Prospect at the time, Musk\u2019s fingerprints and associates remain<\/a> all over the pseudo-agency. Chief among them is his longtime friend and investor, Antonio Gracias.<\/p>\n

Gracias has been at DOGE for some time, first as a purveyor of Social Security misinformation<\/a>, and now as chief<\/a> of its immigration task force in coordination with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Similar to Musk, Gracias currently faces questions surrounding his time commitments with DOGE and its effect on his several other private-sector jobs. You see, Gracias remains CEO of Valor Equity Partners, a private equity investment manager handling $17.5 billion in assets, including hundreds of millions of dollars<\/a> of public employees\u2019 state and local pension funds.<\/p>\n

This past June, the AFL-CIO published an informative report<\/a> on Gracias, highlighting his role at DOGE and proposing due diligence questions regarding its impact on his capacity to appropriately fulfill his fiduciary responsibilities to Valor.<\/p>\n

Even excluding his time at DOGE, Gracias\u2019s work portfolio paints a picture of a man stretched thin indeed. He serves as both CEO and chief investment officer at Valor and is a member of each of the firm\u2019s investment committees. According to his Valor biography<\/a>, Gracias is also director of several companies in Valor\u2019s portfolio, including SpaceX, AI infrastructure company WEKA, and delivery drone manufacturer Zipline. He\u2019s a trustee of the Aspen Institute, board member of World Business Chicago, and a member of the board of visitors for Georgetown\u2019s School of Foreign Service and the University of Chicago Law School. Quite a busy schedule.<\/p>\n

Read more from the Revolving Door Project<\/a><\/p>\n

Heading Valor\u2019s investment decisions would seem to be a full-time job by itself. In addition to its investment management services, Valor also has an extensive venture capital portfolio<\/a>\u2014their incomplete portfolio lists over 350 investments\u2014including investments in defense company Anduril and each of Musk\u2019s companies. Gracias has a fiduciary duty to devote significant time and attention to ensure these investments are well managed and in the best interests of investors.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s tenure at the agency showed how a role at DOGE can complicate that responsibility. Before Musk\u2019s exit, Tesla stock was down<\/a> 14 percent for the year, profit was down<\/a> 71 percent, sales were down 13 percent<\/a>, and there were nationwide protests<\/a> at Tesla showrooms. Shareholders took notice, putting the blame on Musk\u2019s political activities and making public calls<\/a> for Tesla\u2019s board to force him out of the administration or otherwise remove him as CEO. Musk tried to save face, calling his exit<\/a> the end of his \u201cscheduled time as a Special Government Employee,\u201d but it\u2019s safe to assume that the pressure campaign was a greater factor than a newfound<\/a> commitment to the rule of law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

With the AFL-CIO\u2019s new report, Antonio Gracias\u2019s time in the federal government could be on a similar trajectory. He has already been a public face of one of DOGE\u2019s worst scandals. Onstage with Musk ahead of the Wisconsin state supreme court election, Gracias helped launder<\/a> an unfounded conspiracy that millions of undocumented immigrants were collecting Social Security. He and Musk claimed credit for DOGE uncovering the supposed scandal, and he later told<\/a> the All-In podcast that it was \u201ca move to import voters.\u201d The claims were thoroughly debunked and revealed<\/a> as either outright dishonesty or a comically stupid misunderstanding of the system. The millions of public employees whose pension funds are managed by Gracias and Valor may not appreciate his attempts to undermine one of the three legs of the retirement stool<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just Gracias either\u2014he\u2019s joined at DOGE by Jon Koval, a vice president<\/a> on Valor\u2019s investment team, and Payton Rehling, a Valor senior associate and data engineer. It\u2019s unclear how many hours per week each of them is working at DOGE, but NPR<\/a> reporting showed that descriptions from partially redacted court filings in AFSCME v. Social Security Administration<\/a> match the biographies of Gracias, Koval, and Rehling. The filings indicate that all three are serving one-year terms as \u201cexperts\u201d and are employed at the Social Security Administration\u2019s headquarters in Woodlawn, Maryland\u2014a far trip from Valor\u2019s Chicago headquarters<\/a>. Perhaps this is why, according to the AFL-CIO\u2019s analysis<\/a>, flight records for Valor\u2019s private jet show that 40 percent of its flights from January to April 2025 were to or from Washington, D.C., compared to just 8 percent last year. The records do not specify who is on these flights or why, but it could be indicative of the divided time and attention of Valor\u2019s top brass.<\/p>\n

The AFL-CIO\u2019s report provides sample due diligence questions that investors could consider, including how Valor has managed to cover the absences of Gracias, Koval, and Rehling, whether an interim CEO and CIO have taken over Gracias\u2019s duties, and whether they have reduced the compensation\u2014and correspondingly reduced fees\u2014of the employees to reflect the time spent working for DOGE rather than Valor, among others. These questions will only become more pertinent as Gracias continues in his role on DOGE\u2019s immigration task force.<\/p>\n

The Republican reconciliation bill ballooned the budget for Trump\u2019s mass deportation plans, allocating $170 billion<\/a> to the efforts, including $45 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention camps and $30 billion for ICE personnel. It\u2019s unclear thus far what role DOGE will play in this expanded operation, but DOGE has already assisted<\/a> DHS in revoking parole and terminating visas for immigrants. It\u2019s also been involved<\/a> in DHS plans to upgrade its current biometric database with the Homeland Advanced Recognition Technology (HART) program, a cloud-based database that a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report<\/a> described as having \u201cprivacy weaknesses,\u201d which risk the identifying information of hundreds of millions of people.<\/p>\n

Gracias and DOGE will presumably remain a fixture in implementing the technical aspects of these mass deportation policies that are already underwater<\/a> with the public. If so, it could also create a conflict of interest for Gracias. According to reporting from The Intercept<\/a>, the reconciliation bill included $6 billion for border security technology, with such specific requirements on who can be contracted for the tech that Anduril, a Valor-backed defense contractor, is the only company that can qualify. If Gracias assists Anduril with border technology, is he acting in the best financial interest of all of Valor\u2019s fiduciaries, or simply greasing the wheels for a specific firm in his venture capital portfolio?<\/p>\n

Although it was initially set to be disbanded in July 2026, Republicans are now looking to institutionalize DOGE<\/a> with appropriation bills this fall. Even if Gracias only serves the remainder of his one-year term, his involvement in draconian treatment of immigrants and misinformation around Social Security puts a stain on Valor\u2019s reputation that will be hard to clean off. DOGE\u2019s haphazard gutting of the federal government has already had negative downstream effects on state and local government employees, with state health departments and local libraries forced to scale down<\/a> amid cuts to federal grants. With Republican-led states implementing their own state-level DOGE<\/a> apparatuses, these public-sector employees may soon be subjected to expanded, chaotic workforce slashings similar to those that Gracias helped pioneer at the federal level.<\/p>\n

The AFL-CIO report may get the ball rolling for public employee pension funds and other fiduciaries to pressure Valor to address these concerns. If Musk\u2019s fiasco with Tesla stockholders is any indication, Gracias\u2019s DOGE involvement may be subjected to mounting scrutiny from Valor investors, especially as Trump\u2019s immigration policies become even more horrific and damaging to the economy<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Revolving Door Project, a Prospect partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":9633,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[9559,28,9557,1430,9556,12,11,2421,9558,9560,147,530,111,9561],"class_list":["post-9632","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-personal-finance","tag-afl-cio","tag-business","tag-ceos","tag-corporate-governance","tag-doge","tag-donald-trump","tag-elon-musk","tag-federal-government","tag-financial-industry","tag-kj-boyle","tag-personal-finance","tag-personalfinance","tag-politics","tag-revolving-door-project"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}