Hegseth earned $4.6M in salary as Fox News host in past 2 years, nearly $1M in speaking engagements

Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth earned roughly $4.6 million in the past two years as a Fox News host, his first personal financial disclosure report filed to the Office of Government Ethics shows.

Additionally, he received speaking engagement fees of a total of $900,000 for 40 different events in the past two years, most of the speaking fees ranging from $7,500 to $27,500. The single biggest engagement fee Hegseth received was $150,000 from an American Legislative Exchange Council event in February 2023.

Income reported in this disclosure covers Jan. 1, 2023, through Dec. 23, 2024.

The Armed Services Committee is expected to hold Hegseth's confirmation hearing on Tuesday, ahead of President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration.

Many of the events he spoke at were political events hosted by conservative groups or PACs, including a Turning Point USA event in May 2023, a Heritage Foundation event in April 2023, and an NRA event in May 2024. He also spoke at schools and churches, including Cornerstone Christian School in Abingdon, Virginia, Paideia Academy in Knoxville, Tennessee, Georgia Christian School in Valdosta, Georgia, Westgate Chapel in Edmonds, Virginia, Point of View Ministries in Dallas. He also spoke at several Veterans events hosted by Texas-based group Helping a Hero.

Hegseth also earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in book advances, including $348,000 from "The War on Warriors" and $150,000 from "Battle for the American Mind." He additionally received between $100,001 and $1 million in royalties from each book.

He also made between $100,000 and $1 million after selling a house in Baltimore in 2023.

The disclosure report shows that Hegseth earned between $6.3 million and $9 million in income in the last two years.

Hegseth also reported owning several dozen corporate stocks, each valued between $1,001 and $50,000. Among those assets are $1,001 - $15,000 each in defense corporations Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman Corp. He also owns stocks in tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Oracle.

In his ethics agreement, Hegseth has not pledged to divest from these assets but instead promised to "monitor values of these interests" to see if they go beyond the minimum amount required for divestiture.

The former "Fox & Friends" anchor has faced scrutiny from lawmakers over his lack of experience and following reports of both financial and sexual misconduct. Hegseth has denied all of these allegations, but it has created some uncertainty about whether he will get the 50 votes he needs to be confirmed.

Disclosure reports filed by several other Trump nominees

Additional disclosures filed over the weekend also showed wealth and financial interests of other Trump nominees and appointees.

So far, Treasury Secretary Nominee Scott Bessent has disclosed the largest amount of wealth among those who have filed their reports, owning at least $465 million and up to $705 million in assets.

That included more than $100 million in Treasury bills and more than $150 million shares of three major ETFs, as well as tens of millions in real estate, including properties in the Bahamas and in North Carolina, and North Dakota farmland from which he earns money from corn and soybean production.

Bessent also owns between $1 million and $5 million worth of art and antiques, according to the disclosure, and reported owning up to $5 million of conservative publishing house All Seasons Press, which published convicted Trump advisor Peter Navarro’s book in 2021. He also reported tens of millions of dollars in total in mortgage, line of credit and loans.

Bessent made $3.8 million in income from his role as CEO of his hedge fund Key Square Partners in the last two years, though the bulk of his net worth comes from his investments.

Former Rep. Lee Zeldin, picked as Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, made a living through his consulting firm Zeldin Strategies, making $775,000 in salary and an additional $1 million to $5 million in dividends over the past two years. Notably, Zeldin also earned $120,000 in total from writing various op-eds published in places like Real Clear Politics, Newsweek, the Washington Times, Fox News and the New York Post, each fee ranging between $3,000 and $30,000. Zeldin also received a salary of nearly $145,000 from think tank America First Works in the past two years.

Trump’s nominee for Veteran Affairs, former Rep. Doug Collins, has earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in consulting, media appearances, and think tank work in the past two years, including $623,500 from his consulting firm Dogwood Strategies and $104,000 in salary from pro-Trump nonprofit America First Policy Institute.

Collins also reported earning $50,000 in rental fees from a rental property in Daytona Beach, which is worth between $50,000 and $1 million, his disclosure shows.

Sen. Marco Rubio, the nominee for secretary of State, has earned only minimal income outside his $174,000 salary as a United State senator. Additionally, Rubio earned a little more than $20,000 as adjunct professor at Florida International University, the contract for which expired at the end of 2024.

Rubio also reported earning between $15,001 and $50,000 in royalties from his book, “Decades of Decadence,” which was published in June 2023.