By George News | georgenews.org | November 10, 2026
The President of the United States should not have to share his West Wing with a Cabinet Secretary whose household helped staff, fund, and consult for the last Republican who tried to beat him.
Meghan P. Bauer — born Meghan Patenaude — is Assistant to the President and Cabinet Secretary, the official who sits between President Trump and his Cabinet. Susie Wiles recruited her on New Year’s Day 2025. She started as Director of Scheduling on Inauguration Day and, since November 21, 2025, has run the Office of Cabinet Affairs.
A senior White House source tells me Bauer is being fired. MS NOW reported on the night of November 10 that the President has grown increasingly frustrated with her, that she is expected to leave around the end of the year, and that her office could be folded under Stephen Miller.
End of the year is not soon enough.
Bauer oversaw the White House’s unofficial “Cabinet Travel Competition,” the midterm points contest The Atlantic says Wiles reviewed with her nearly every day. Cabinet secretaries were scored for showing up in swing districts. Republicans then lost the House and the Senate. A federal watchdog once condemned a nearly identical Bush-era scheme as the kind of electioneering the Hatch Act forbids. That does not mean Bauer broke the law. It does mean her contest put the President’s Cabinet next to a risk a prior White House already paid for.
This is not an attack on President Trump. It is a defense of him. I have said since my May 28, 2024 thread that the danger around this President is not the man — it is the staff. After February 28, 2025, I was shut out of White House press approvals for 6 months over my reporting on that staff, and I was threatened with losing my credentials over my work on LaCivita and the Spies circle. The Bauer file is the same story with a new name on the door.
Mr. President, we told you about Charlie Spies, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles. Please do the right thing again. Meghan needs to be removed now, for the good of the nation.
From Pence world to the West Wing
Bauer is a New Hampshire native who, she told IW Features, moved to the Washington area at age ten when her mother joined the George W. Bush administration. After college she worked at the Jack Kemp Foundation and earned a master’s in finance from Georgetown. She has said she planned to get far away from politics — until Donald Trump came down the escalator.
She packed for New York and joined the 2016 campaign on the fifth floor of Trump Tower, on what she recalled as the old set of The Apprentice. In the first Trump administration she worked in scheduling and as a senior policy advisor at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. In 2020, she has said, she thought she was leaving politics for real estate finance.
That “hiatus” is on her public financial disclosure. She listed herself as Chief of Staff at Greystone Funding Company LLC, a New York firm, from March 2022 to June 2023, and as a consultant at Bauer Consulting of Vienna, Virginia, from January 2024 to January 2025.
She also spent those years inside Pence world. 1100 Pennsylvania reported in 2019 that she and her husband, Zach Bauer, met while working for Mike Pence. Bauer later told IW Features she met her husband on the campaign. Both can be true: Pence joined the Republican ticket in July 2016.
In January 2017, Vice President Pence swore in her mother, Pamela Patenaude, as Deputy Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Meghan stood beside them and held the Bible.
That is the circle. A daughter of a Bush-and-HUD housing official. A wife of Pence’s longtime aide. A Wiles recruit. And, as of last fall, the person coordinating the President’s Cabinet.
The Wiles connection
Bauer did not wander back into the building. On New Year’s Day 2025, Wiles called her and asked her to return to the White House. Bauer has said she had a three-year-old and a six-month-old at the time, and that her husband was starting a new job that same month — the month Zach Bauer became CEO of Passages, the Israel-trip organization he now leads.
She came back on January 20, 2025, as Director of Scheduling for the President, the title on her OGE Form 278e new-entrant report. On November 21, 2025, she became Assistant to the President and Cabinet Secretary.
In the IW Features profile published October 21, 2026 — less than three weeks before the midterms — Bauer said her first meeting of the day is with Wiles at senior staff. She called it “such a privilege to work for the first female chief of staff ever” and said Wiles “inspired me to get up every day and do my best.”
Loyalty to Wiles is not the same thing as loyalty to the President. Wiles put Bauer in the job, and The Atlantic says Wiles sat with her nearly every day to review the travel tally. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins has already called Wiles’s two years “a real gift” and said there “won’t be really any disruption” under Stephen Miller. The President does not owe that circle a soft landing.
The Cabinet Travel Competition
On September 13, 2026, Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer of The Atlantic published “The White House’s Midterm-Travel Sweepstakes.” The piece opens with Bauer by name:
Nearly every day, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles meets with Meghan Bauer, a presidential assistant who coordinates with Cabinet members, to review who’s recently traveled where... The debrief is part of the administration’s unofficial Cabinet Travel Competition, overseen by Bauer.
The formal contest ran from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Secretaries were then encouraged to keep going through November. Cabinet members were tracked for visits to swing districts and states. There were rumors of a prize — a dinner with the President — though officials said it was for bragging rights. One Cabinet secretary skipped a Manhattan event for fear of being “docked points.” Officials said nobody loses points, and that a cable-news hit in New York would still count.
The White House would not give the authors Bauer’s scoreboard. It said only that Cabinet members made 265 visits to 13 states over the summer. By the authors’ count, Small Business Administrator Kelly Loeffler made about 18 trips and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins about 17.
Bauer has not been quiet about the travel portfolio. In that same October IW Features interview, she said she oversees the Cabinet’s meetings with the President, their media interviews, “and their travel around America.” She pulled a U.S. map of the secretaries’ travel for the week out from under a stack of papers and showed it to the reporter.
Before the 2006 midterms, the Bush White House ran its own Cabinet travel “friendly competition,” tracking trips into battleground races. The Office of Special Counsel, the federal watchdog that enforces the Hatch Act, later condemned that effort. The watchdog found the “friendly competition” was “the type of electioneering proscribed by the Hatch Act,” the law that limits political activity by federal employees. The Atlantic is the source for that characterization of the OSC finding; the underlying OSC work was reported when the Bush-era report was released in January 2011.
The Atlantic also noted that President Trump fired the head of that office after he returned, and that the Hatch Act has not been enforced against senior officials since. Donald Sherman of CREW told the authors it is “hard to imagine that that compliance is being prioritized in a competition-like scenario.” The article does not say taxpayer money was spent on political travel.
I am not accusing Meghan Bauer of a Hatch Act violation. I am saying she ran a points contest a federal watchdog had already flagged as the kind of electioneering the statute forbids — as the liaison to the entire Cabinet, with the chief of staff checking the tote board almost every day. Then Republicans lost the House and the Senate.
What her financial disclosure shows
Bauer signed her new-entrant OGE Form 278e on May 20, 2025, after a 90-day filing extension. The report lists no liabilities.
It does list a family business. Bauer Consulting, a limited liability company in Vienna, Virginia, paid her $120,000 in salary or bonus for consulting work from January 2024 to January 2025. Under sources of compensation exceeding $5,000 in a year, she listed three names: Greystone Funding Company LLC; Bauer Consulting; and Granite Housing Strategies of Moultonborough, New Hampshire, identified as a “Client of Bauer Consulting.”
Granite Housing Strategies is her mother’s firm. The Commission of Fine Arts, where Pamela Hughes Patenaude now sits, describes her as principal of that company. In other words, the only client Bauer disclosed for the firm that paid her $120,000 the year before she entered the White House is her mother.
Her spouse’s income, listed without dollar amounts as the form allows, came from two employers: Passages Israel and Advancing American Freedom. The first is the Christian Israel-trip organization Zach Bauer now runs. The second is Mike Pence’s advocacy group.
Among the family’s other assets is stock in Target Hospitality Corp. (ticker: TH), valued at $1,001 to $15,000. Patenaude serves on that company’s board of directors. Target Hospitality holds federal immigration detention contracts; the Houston Chronicle reported in February 2026 on the company’s profits from the administration’s detention policies.
A holding in that range is not a secret fortune. It is, however, a family financial tie to a contractor whose business runs through federal agencies the Cabinet Secretary exists to coordinate. The public can weigh that appearance for itself.
The mother: Pamela Patenaude
Pamela Hughes Patenaude is not a bit player in her daughter’s story. She is the through-line.
She is a New Hampshire housing official who served in the Bush years, then as HUD Deputy Secretary from 2017 to 2019. Pence swore her in. Meghan held the Bible. In January 2019 she resigned. The Washington Post tied the departure to disagreements with the administration, including a fight over Puerto Rico disaster funds.
She then built Granite Housing Strategies in Moultonborough — the same firm that, according to her daughter’s disclosure, was the only listed client of Bauer Consulting during the year that company paid Meghan $120,000.
This administration put her back inside the President’s ornamental orbit anyway. She was appointed in 2025 to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House and, in 2026, to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.
Federal Election Commission records add a political footnote. On August 9, 2023, Pamela Patenaude of Moultonborough, listing her employer as Granite Housing Strategies LLC, gave $155 to Mike Pence for President (FEC ID C00842039). After Pence quit the race, she gave to Nikki Haley for President: $310 on November 15, 2023, $250 on December 18, 2023, and $250 on January 15, 2024 — $810 in all.
So the Cabinet Secretary’s mother clashed with President Trump’s first term, donated to the two Republicans who tried to stop him in the 2024 primary, was the only disclosed client of her daughter’s $120,000 consulting year, sits on the board of a detention contractor in which the family holds stock, and now holds two presidential appointments tied to the White House itself.
That is not “draining the swamp.” That is inviting it back for coffee.
The husband: Zach Bauer, Pence 2024 money, and Passages
Zach Bauer is the son of conservative activist Gary Bauer. His biography on the Passages website says he began in the U.S. House and in the office of Indiana Governor Mike Pence, then spent nearly a decade in senior roles alongside Vice President Pence, including as a White House senior advisor. After leaving government he worked at MO Strategies and as National Political Director of the Pence 2024 campaign. He later served as Strategic Development Officer at Advancing American Freedom before becoming CEO of Passages.
Pence’s 2024 campaign was not a think-tank exercise. It was a Republican primary against Donald Trump. FEC records show how that campaign, and Pence’s leadership PAC, paid the Bauer household.
What Pence for President paid Zach Bauer
Mike Pence for President (C00842039), Pence’s principal campaign committee, reported four disbursements to “BAUER, ZACHARY” of Vienna, Virginia 22182:
July 28, 2023 — $3,000, “GENERAL CAMPAIGN CONSULTING” (FEC image)
August 15, 2023 — $304, “TRAVEL” (FEC image)
August 31, 2023 — $3,000, “GENERAL CAMPAIGN CONSULTING” (FEC image)
October 2, 2023 — $42.20, travel under a $200 vendor aggregate (FEC image)
That is $6,346.20 from the campaign that ran against President Trump to the man now married to the President’s Cabinet Secretary. The two consulting checks alone are $6,000. The committee’s itemized Bauer payments are collected on this FEC search.
Pence launched in early June 2023 and suspended his campaign on October 28, 2023. The payments sit inside that window.
What the household gave back
The money did not flow only one way. On June 23, 2023, eighteen days after Pence’s committee first filed with the FEC, husband and wife each gave the campaign $250 from the same Vienna address, ZIP+4 22182-6037, reported on the same FEC filing image:
Bauer, Meghan P. — $250 to Mike Pence for President. The filing listed her employer as the Federal Housing Finance Agency and her occupation as “GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE.” Her later OGE report says she was Chief of Staff at Greystone through June 2023; FEC employer fields are often stale. The donor line is not. It is her name, her middle initial, and her household address.
Bauer, Zach C. — $250 to Mike Pence for President. He listed his employer as Bauer Consulting LLC and his occupation as consultant.
On July 12, 2023, Zach C. Bauer of the same address gave another $1, earmarked from WinRed, again listing Bauer Consulting LLC as his employer.
The current Cabinet Secretary personally donated to Mike Pence’s campaign against Donald Trump. So did her husband, who was about to collect consulting fees from that same campaign. So did her mother. I found no itemized contribution from Meghan or Zach Bauer to other 2024 presidential candidates in the records I reviewed. Committed to America PAC (C00839464), the Pence-aligned super PAC, reported no disbursements to anyone named Bauer in the 2024 or 2026 cycles.
Pence’s leadership PAC and “Bauer Consulting LLC”
Before the presidential campaign there was Great America Committee (C00640664), the leadership PAC Mike Pence registered in 2017 and that OpenSecrets identifies as affiliated with him. Its itemized Bauer payments are on this FEC search.
That PAC paid Bauer Consulting LLC of Vienna, Virginia 22182 — the same city and ZIP as Zach Bauer — $21,652.44 between November 2022 and June 2023 for political strategy, management, and fundraising consulting, plus travel. Of that, $6,652.44 was paid in late 2022 and $15,000 in 2023, including a single $7,500 non-federal “political strategy/mgmt consulting” payment on June 6, 2023, the week Pence’s presidential committee registered (FEC image).
The same PAC separately reimbursed Zach Bauer himself $5,468.88 in travel, mileage, per diem, and other reimbursements from November 29, 2021, through September 20, 2022. The largest of those was $2,601.18 on August 22, 2022 (FEC image). A June 6, 2022 reimbursement of $535.57 listed his address as Vienna, Virginia 22182 (FEC image).
Zach Bauer’s own FEC entries identify him, in June and July 2023, as a consultant at Bauer Consulting LLC of Vienna. Meghan later disclosed a firm of the same name in Vienna starting in January 2024, with only her mother’s company as a named client. The filings do not, by themselves, prove which spouse performed the 2022–23 work billed to Great America Committee, and they show no payment from these Pence committees to Meghan Bauer by name. They do prove Pence’s leadership PAC paid a Vienna “Bauer Consulting LLC” $21,652.44, paid Zach $5,468.88 in travel reimbursements, and that his presidential campaign then paid Zach another $6,346.20 while he was listing that LLC as his employer — $11,815.08 to him personally, or $33,467.52 if the LLC bills are included.
Zach Bauer’s private texts ended up in the January 6 Committee’s files. In a March 30, 2022 deposition, committee investigators questioned Pence legislative director Chris Hodgson about them. Hodgson identified him as “Zach Bauer, the Vice President’s personal aide,” the body man.
On December 21, 2020, President Trump met at the White House with House Freedom Caucus members about challenging the election. Hodgson texted Bauer to ask whether Pence had sat in. Bauer replied: “He did... sadly. Marc was in there too.” He then called the meeting “interesting, like living in an alternative universe.” Hodgson told the committee he understood Bauer to be signaling that he disagreed with the members pressing to change the election’s outcome.
Bauer was also one of the two recipients, with Marc Short, of a January 6 email summarizing a Conservative Action Project call about the objections to the electors. He was with the Vice President’s team throughout that day. Bauer himself is not on record as testifying.
So the man whose wife now runs the President’s Cabinet affairs privately mocked the President’s fight over the election as an “alternative universe.”
Advancing American Freedom and Passages
After the failed primary, Zach Bauer went to work for Advancing American Freedom, the group Pence founded in 2021. Meghan Bauer’s disclosure lists a spouse salary from that organization.
AAF has not been a quiet friend of the President’s second-term agenda. Ahead of the April 2, 2025, “Liberation Day” tariffs, Fox News reported that AAF called them “essentially a tax on American consumers and businesses.” The group launched a six-figure campaign against the tariffs and told Congress that “Your constituents are hurting because of President Trump’s tariffs.” After the midterm losses, Pence argued in the Wall Street Journal — as quoted by the Washington Examiner — that voters had “rejected our party’s shift toward economic populism,” named tariffs, and said he would intensify that work through AAF. That is the shop that was paying the Cabinet Secretary’s husband.
In January 2025 — the same month Wiles brought Meghan back to the White House — Zach Bauer became CEO of Passages (Passages America Israel, Inc.). Passages began in 2015 as a program connected to the Philos Project, a Christian pro-Israel organization, and was separately incorporated in 2016. It runs Birthright-style trips that take Christian students to Israel. In his first interview as CEO, Zach Bauer told eJewishPhilanthropy he wanted a pipeline of students who would “be outspoken, pro-Israel advocates” and then enter “influential fields.” Passages has been a major grant recipient, including multi-million-dollar support connected to the Marcus Foundation and, according to InfluenceWatch, $2.5 million from DonorsTrust in both 2023 and 2024.
There is nothing unlawful about a private citizen running a pro-Israel nonprofit. The relevant fact for the President is narrower: his Cabinet Secretary’s husband went from Pence’s White House, to Pence’s campaign against him, to Pence’s anti-tariff advocacy group, to the leadership of a well-funded organization whose stated aim is to shape a new generation of American advocates for Israel.
A Trump Hotel wedding, and a wider circle
On November 18, 2019, 1100 Pennsylvania published a detailed account of the couple’s courtship under the headline “Two Trump politicals, one Trump Hotel.” The site reported that Meghan and Zach met working for Pence; that they held their engagement party at the Trump International Hotel in Washington in December 2018; and that they held their wedding reception in the hotel’s ballroom, at an estimated cost of at least $35,000.
They celebrated in a building with the President’s name on it. Then, in 2023, they wrote checks to the man who tried to take the nomination from him.
The pattern around Wiles is not limited to Bauer. The Daily Mail reported that Morgan DeWitt-Snow, who ran Presidential Personnel and was called “Susie’s pet,” had given $10 to Pence in June 2023 — and that Wiles saved her job after the donation became public.
One Pence donation at Presidential Personnel. Another Pence donor, married to Pence’s former national political director, running Cabinet Affairs. A chief of staff who recruited the second and protected the first. That is not a coincidence. It is a personnel system.
She needs to go now
MS NOW’s Jake Traylor and Vaughn Hillyard reported on November 10 that two current White House officials say the President has grown increasingly frustrated with Bauer over the past few months and has discussed her removal with senior staff. Additional sources told the network she would transition out around the end of the year and that her responsibilities could be consolidated under Miller.
Senior White House sources tells me she is being fired.
If the President has already lost confidence in her, dragging the exit into December or January is a gift to the same circle that failed him in November. It leaves the woman who ran the midterm travel contest in charge of coordinating the Cabinet after Republicans lost both chambers. It tells every secretary that the points system, and the person who kept the map, will still be in the room.
Bauer should go now. Not “at the end of the year.” Not after a ceremonial handoff. Now.
The reasons do not require a criminal charge, and I am not making one. They require judgment. President Trump won a mandate from the American people. He deserves a Cabinet Secretary who was not installed by Susie Wiles, who did not spend 2023 financially tied to the last Republican who tried to beat him, and who did not turn his Cabinet into a midterm sweepstakes.
I laid out the first cut of this file in my thread of November 10. The FEC records, the disclosure, and the travel contest make the choice obvious.
Remove Meghan Bauer now. It is for the good of the President, and for the good of the nation.
Sources
Meghan Bauer, OGE Form 278e new-entrant report, signed May 20, 2025.
Jordan Jantz, “Inside the ‘Most Pro-Family’ White House with Meghan Bauer,” IW Features, October 21, 2026.
Jake Traylor and Vaughn Hillyard, “White House Cabinet official expected to depart amid Trump staff shake-up after midterm losses,” MS NOW, November 10, 2026.
Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, “The White House’s Midterm-Travel Sweepstakes,” The Atlantic, September 13, 2026; archived copy.
FEC, Mike Pence for President (C00842039); disbursements to Bauer; receipts from Bauer; receipts from Patenaude.
FEC, Great America Committee (C00640664); disbursements to Bauer; OpenSecrets profile.
“Two Trump politicals, one Trump Hotel,” 1100 Pennsylvania, November 18, 2019.
“After butting heads with Trump administration, top HUD official departs agency,” The Washington Post, January 16, 2019.
U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, Pamela Hughes Patenaude biography.
Target Hospitality, Board of Directors; Houston Chronicle, February 2026 investigation.
Passages, About / leadership; Haley Cohen, “New CEO of Passages hopes to reinvigorate support for Israel with young evangelicals,” eJewishPhilanthropy, January 31, 2025; InfluenceWatch.
Fox News, AAF on Trump tariffs; AAF, April 8, 2025 campaign; Washington Examiner, April 29, 2025; Washington Examiner, midterm excerpt of Pence’s Wall Street Journal argument.
Daily Mail / DNYUZ reprint, “Susie Wiles’ pet protege on thin ice after meager donation report,” August 20, 2026.
Brooke Rollins comments via Joe Zajkowski.
George News, May 28, 2024 thread; November 10, 2026 Bauer thread.
Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, deposition of Chris Hodgson, March 30, 2022, pp. 94–97, 155.