By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org
At a time when trust in government is near historic lows, Florida Bulldog has learned that financial disclosure forms filed by U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the Republican nominee for governor, have been significantly inaccurate the entire time he’s been in Congress.
Rep. Donalds, who represents Southwest Florida and first took office in 2021, filed documents in Washington in recent months acknowledging multiple failures to disclose certain assets and liabilities belonging to him and his wife, Erika, an education entrepreneur in for profit charter schools. The inaccurate reports date to the first federal disclosure report Donalds filed as a House candidate in 2020.
The federal public financial disclosure system, established by Congress in the 1970s following the Watergate scandal, requires senior leaders to disclose their holdings to the public to help prevent conflicts of interest or other ethical concerns. Amendments to correct inaccurate forms are reviewed by the bipartisan House Ethics Committee. If errors or omissions are considered an honest mistake, the committee generally accepts the amendments without penalty; if not the situation shifts from a routine correction to an ethics investigation.
On June 4, Rep. Donalds quietly submitted the first of two amendments to his disclosure reports to the House clerk:
“It has been brought to my attention that my previously filed Financial Disclosure Report (FD) for 2021, 2022, 2023 & 2024 did not include disclosure of certain liabilities,” Rep. Donalds wrote. He then supplied the missing information: tens of thousands of dollars in student loans from the U.S. Department of Education for himself and a dependent child, and a hefty mortgage on his personal residence.
Donalds’s letter does not say who brought those missing liabilities to his attention, and his campaign spokesman, Gates McGavick, declined to discuss it.
“Byron Donalds is committed to disclosure and like most Congressional Members, voluntarily updates his disclosures to ensure ongoing compliance,” McGavick told Florida Bulldog.
Spokesman McGavick wouldn’t answer questions about why those multiple failures to disclose occurred, and whether the congressman can now assure the public that his FD forms are complete and correct.
DONALDS’S NEW DISCLOSURES
The June 4 amendment identifies Rep. Donalds’s mortgage creditor as CrossCountry Mortgage, a large national retail mortgage lender with substantial operations in Florida. He valued the amount he borrowed from CrossCountry at between $500,000 and $1 million, a range allowed by federal standards.
Rep. Donalds is a member of the House Financial Services Committee, which regulates the mortgage industry. He was actively involved in getting the Trump Administration this year to roll back rules put in place in 2008 after the collapse of the subprime mortgage market that had restricted loose credit in states like Florida where rampant investor speculation, notably in the condo market, led to rapid price appreciation, predatory lending and overbuilding. By the time the bubble burst, the entire U.S. financial system was put into jeopardy and post-crisis regulators established geography-specific rules to contain regional volatility that among other things required condo buyers in so-called “sand states” like Florida, California and Arizona to make higher down payments. Rep. Donalds framed the change as a matter of fairness.
Rep. Donalds, who is aligned with the conservative movement’s push to decentralize federal control over education, listed student loans he described as all being incurred in September 2021. The initial loan amount was said to be worth between $15,000 and $50,000. The loan amount for 2022 and 2023 was upped to between $100,000 and $250,000. The liability amount rose again in 2024 to between $250,000 and $500,000. Precisely what those loans were for was not disclosed.
On Aug. 13, Donalds submitted a second amendment covering his financial disclosure forms for 2020, 2021, 2022, 2022, 2023 and 2024 – this time identifying reportable assets he neglected to previously report. Again, he stated the omissions were brought to his attention by someone he did not name.
The asset is a single open-end mutual fund held by Erika Donalds’ employer-sponsored 401(K). Her employer is OptimaEd, the Naples-based charter school company she leads. The fund, Nuveen Lifecycle Index 2024 Fund R6 Class, was valued at between $5,000 and $15,0000 in 2020. By 2024 its value had risen to between $50,000 and $100,000, the amendment says.
Rep. Donalds, however, did not amend his 2025 annual FD report to disclose his wife’s 401(K) or the value of its sole holding, the Nuveen Lifecycle fund. He did disclose that information on his 2026 FD form, filed Aug. 13. It values her Nuveen fund as being worth between $100,000 and $250,000.
OTHER ETHICAL BREACHES
The accurate and timely filing of his FD forms isn’t the only ethical breach that the man who wants to be Florida’s next governor has committed since he’s been in office.
In September 2024, Washington’s nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the Office of Congressional ethics asking it to investigate Rep. Donalds for not disclosing over 100 stock trades he made that totaled about $1.6 million. The complaint alleged the trades violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act.
The act requires lawmakers to file Periodic Transaction Reports (PTRs) within 45 days of trading any stock that exceeds $1,000 or risk facing penalties. The complaint says that while Rep. Donalds and Erika Donalds made 108 stock trades between 2022 and 2023 valued up to $1.6 million, he failed to file PTRs for any of these transactions.
The outcome of the CLC’s complaint has not been made public. That suggests the recently renamed Office of Congressional Conduct (OCC) dismissed the case after Rep. Donalds filed amendments to his financial disclosure reports to disclose the transactions. The OCC is not required to release its report.
Rep. Donalds’s campaign was also busy over the summer attempting to set things right with the Federal Election Commission. In August 2025, Florida Bulldog first reported that Rep. Donalds was actually running two campaigns – for governor and for re-election to Congress.
The FEC discovered that duality and on Aug. 5, 2025 notified Rep. Donalds by letter that his re-election campaign ended when he declared his candidacy for governor the previous February 25. Within two days of that move, his re-election campaign disbursed $1.2 million to his state political committee, Friends of Byron Donalds PAC.
According to the Florida Division of Elections, through Sept. 25 Donalds’s PAC has received $119.9 million in contributions since he entered the governor’s race. The PAC spent $82.5 million during the same period. [Donalds’s Democratic Party opponent, David Jolly, has raised $9.3 million and spent $7.6 million since he declared his candidacy in June 2025.]
The FEC also told Rep. Donalds was told that he must refund contributions made after that date. He’s yet to do that. Indeed, he essentially blew off the FEC.
“While Congressman Donalds has announced his candidacy for Florida governor, he has not officially ended his Congressional re-election campaign and he has made no announcement to that effect. As Congressman Donalds is still an active candidate for the 2025-2026 Election Cycle, no primary election contributions are required to be refunded at this time,” campaign treasurer Bradley T. Crate wrote back the next day.
Meanwhile, Rep. Donalds kept his House re-election campaign active and raised more than $125,000 in additional contributions through the end of June 2026, according to FEC reports.
On Aug. 6, 2026, one year after being told to stop raising federal re-election funds, Crate notified the FEC that Rep. Donalds was no longer seeking re-election.
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