Ex Kansas GOP chief and Trump bundler gets his turn at federal trough | Opinion
After years of railing against the Deep State, former Kansas Republican Party Chairman Mike Brown is now up to his eyeballs in the swamp Donald Trump keeps promising to drain.
In a shameless act of political patronage by the Trump Administration, Brown has been appointed as the director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing at the U.S. Treasury.
He’s been working for Trump’s Treasury Department for (checks calendar) seven months.
The bureau is responsible for the design, printing, distribution and security of our paper money, and is about to start putting the gaudy signature of you-know-who on the currency. (There’s a law against putting a living president’s face on U.S. legal tender).
I was laughing out loud as I read a congratulatory message on Facebook from the Kansas Republican Party, which basically kicked Brown to the curb after two years of his obnoxious and paranoid tenure as party chairman.
An election conspiracy theorist from the get-go, Brown lost his seat on the Johnson County Commission in 2020 and ran unsuccessfully against Secretary of State Scott Schwab on a “stop the steal” platform in 2022, before narrowly winning the job as state GOP chairman in 2023.
Under his leadership, the state party sought to empower Brown’s loyalists by removing state office holders, members of Congress and representatives of Black, Latino and women’s GOP groups from party committees.
The plan was only scrapped after fierce pushback from notable conservative-and-responsible Republicans, including Sedgwick County Clerk and former state chairman Kelly Arnold, and then-Park City City Council member Ben Sauceda, chairman of the Kansas chapter of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly.
Brown also accused his immediate predecessor as party chairman, Mike Kuckelman, of stalking him and his wife, because Kuckelman kept showing up to the same Republican events as the Browns (imagine that).
But the really fun part of all this for me was reading Brown’s response in the comments on the state party’s Facebook post congratulating him on his new job:
Thank you to the KSGOP!
It’s an amazing honor to serve as the Director of BEP, and one I earned the hard way - in Kansas.
Donald Trump is the greatest President in American history, and I am proud to be apart (sic) of his team.
Thank you Kansas.
I wouldn’t be here without you!
You can take that last sentence to the bank.
In October 2024, I outed Brown as Donald Trump campaign contribution Bundler #2024027, and detailed how he was taking personal credit for contributions that Kansas Republicans made to Trump’s presidential campaign via the state party.
In that column, I likened it to you paying for a flight and Brown getting your frequent-flyer miles.
I also pointed out that “bundlers” are a special class of political donors who raise large sums of campaign cash through their business and personal connections, for which they are often rewarded with cushy administration jobs. At the time, Brown swore that his only reward would be the satisfaction of helping Trump get elected to a second term.
So it’s probably just a coincidence that eight months after Trump took office, Brown was on the payroll at Treasury as a “senior adviser,” whatever that is. And now, he’s the man in charge of all our paper money.
I can’t tell you exactly what he’ll make, but his immediate predecessor’s salary was about $200,000 a year.
Of course, it’s possible that Brown’s bundling hustle as GOP chairman had nothing to do with this.
Maybe the White House looked at the job and Brown’s resume and decided what they really needed in this critical executive position is a former construction contractor, one-term county commissioner and widely disliked ex-state chairman.
And if you believe that, I’ve got some rare $3 bills I’m looking to sell.
This story was originally published May 20, 2026 at 4:54 AM.
