Phelan heads the Palm Beach-based private investment firm Rugger Management. Previously he was Managing Partner and Co-Founder of MSD Capital, LP, the private investment firm for Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies. Prior to forming MSD, Phelan was a principal for seven years at ESL Partners, a Greenwich, Connecticut-based investment firm. At ESL, Phelan was responsible for ESL’s Special Situation and Distressed Investments and helped grow the firm from $50 million to over $2 billion in assets under management. Prior to ESL, Phelan was a vice president at the Equity Group and was in charge of acquisitions (Western region) for the Zell-Merrill Lynch Real Estate Opportunity Funds. Phelan began his career at Goldman Sachs & Co., where he worked as a financial analyst in the Investment Banking Division. He has not served in the Navy or any other branch of the military.
He does, however, have an extensive art collection. Phelan and his wife Amy, a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, started collecting art more than two decades ago and they were included on a list of the world’s top 200 art collectors published by Artnews earlier this year. Phelan raised $12 million for Trump’s campaign when he hosted a dinner at his $38 million Aspen home in August. The Phelans are on the North American acquisitions council of the Tate museums and the contemporary art council of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. John also serves on the board of the Aspen Art Museum, where admission has been free for visitors since 2009 thanks to an endowment from him and his wife. From 2006 to 2019, the Phelans also hosted an annual wine tasting event called WineCrush to raise funds for the institution as part of its summer ArtCrush gala.
Stand with USAID until the end. Public servants deserve respect.
Everyone is encouraged to show up and bear witness.
The USAID “pick up your belongings tomorrow” directive is insane, abusive and wildly illegal.
The green light to strip USAID down to the bone was given by Trump-appointed judge Carl Nichols, who ruled last Friday that Trump’s unconstitutional acts to destroy the agency didn’t threaten anyone with irreparable harm.
USAID has made final decisions to cancel nearly 5,800 awards, while keeping more than 500, and that the State Department has canceled about 4,100 awards, while keeping about 2,700.
The time to stand up is now.
1300 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Thursday 7:30 AM - 6 PM
Friday 7:30 AM - 4 PM
A subcommittee hearing entitled “America Last: How Foreign Aid Undermined U.S. Interests Around the World.” Originally titled “How Foreign Aid Lost Its Way.”
USAID distributed $44 billion to over 160 countries in FY 2023. U.S. foreign aid has significant implications for global stability. DOGE has recently lawlessly hacked USAID.
Witnesses:
Tyler O’Neil, Managing Editor, The Daily Signal
Max Primorac, Senior Research Fellow / The Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, The Heritage Foundation
Gregg Roman, Executive Director, Middle East Forum
Noam Unger (Minority Witness), Director of the Sustainable Development and Resilience Initiative, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)
U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, will convene a nominations hearing for Michael Kratsios, nominee to be Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Mark Meador, nominee to be a Federal Trade Commissioner, at 10:00 AM EST on Tuesday, February 25, 2025.
Nominees:
Michael Kratsios, of South Carolina, to be Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy
Mark Meador, of Virginia, to be a Federal Trade Commissioner
Kratsios was a Trump technology advisor and is now managing director at Scale AI, Inc., which specializes in training data for AI. He met with Elon Musk in December.
Kratsios, 38, grew up in South Carolina and graduated magna cum laude in 2008 from Princeton with a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics. He has no other degrees. While in college, he was an intern for Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). After school, he was a Wall Street analyst before working in an investment fund run by Peter Thiel.
In 2024, the Pentagon chose Scale AI to aid its testing and evaluation of A.I. models that might one day help warfighters make decisions.
Meador’s confirmation would give the FTC a Republican majority.
Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee
Stand with USAID until the end. Public servants deserve respect.