Mike Rogers’s Wife Runs a Consultancy That Sells Government Access

Earlier this month, former Republican congressman and Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers appeared on the campaign trail with his wife Kristi, handing out $10 gift cards at a Detroit gas station. “We’re all struggling with incredibly high gas prices,” Ms. Rogers said in a video taken from the scene. “And Mike knows this.”

What voters would not have known from that video is that Ms. Rogers runs a Beltway trade group representing energy traders, mining companies, and manufacturers in their efforts to influence federal officials and federal policy. According to ethics watchdogs, Ms. Rogers’s position, which has not been previously reported, raises the potential for serious conflicts of interest should her husband win his hotly contested Senate race against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.

In January of 2025, Ms. Rogers founded that trade group, known as the Partnerships Revolutionizing International Supply Chain Modernization (PRISM), asking founding private-sector members to pay a $100,000 initiation fee, plus $50,000 in annual dues. Memberships for non-founding corporate partners’ access cost between $25,000 and $50,000. But the Founding Council would have the ability to “shape PRISM’s direction and strategy and have final approval of any and all policy recommendations,” according to PRISM’s website.

In exchange, PRISM would help its members get face time with federal policymakers and diplomats with substantial leverage over decision-making that would affect their businesses. PRISM has held events with at least two Trump administration cabinet members, along with senators and House members.

According to Ms. Rogers’s page on LinkedIn, the focus of those “invitation-only” discussions has been “to turn talk into action on critical minerals, energy resilience, and the foundation of national and economic security,” all issues in vogue under the second Trump administration. Early PRISM joiners included commodity trading behemoth Glencore, engineering giant Siemens, and Detroit-based automaker General Motors.

The timing was auspicious. “We have been up to our eyeballs,” Ms. Rogers said on a podcast last year. The Trump administration has been imposing broad-based tariffs that have shocked commodity prices, while making enormous, highly discretionary federal investments in critical minerals, energy and defense supply chains, and technology feeding the AI and data center boom, and furthermore embarking on military adventures abroad. Having a direct line to federal officials would help companies manage the chaotic shifts, or capitalize on them, PRISM has suggested.

PRISM has offered that as a paid service, facilitating for its members “high-level briefings and roundtables with Congress, the Cabinet, NSC [National Security Council], DOD [Department of Defense], DOE [Department of Energy], DFC [Development Finance Corporation], and USTR [U.S. trade representative].” Those “public-private dialogues” with key offices in the administration and with lawmakers, Ms. Rogers has said, have “shifted the conversation from awareness to alignment—and from alignment to execution.”

The access has been substantial. Last year, members of the group met at the White House with Rep. Gary Palmer (R-AL), who chairs the environment subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, and they convened with Sen. Jim Risch (R-ID), chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at D.C.’s power-dining fixture Cafe Milano alongside officials from the Commerce, State, and Defense Departments to discuss critical minerals and high-tech supply chains, both falling under the recently expanded purview of those agencies.

Over the summer, the group hosted a dinner with Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN), where PRISM members mingled with diplomats from throughout Latin America and representatives from the Development Finance Corporation, which has been providing billions of dollars to infrastructure and energy supply chain projects in the Western Hemisphere, and they met again at the White House with National Security Council officials to discuss the “future of U.S. and allied critical mineral and rare earth element supply chain security.”

Attendees at the meetings also included two cabinet officials. A few months ago, they hosted Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, whose office oversees domestic energy and minerals supply chains, back in Detroit to discuss defense production. Last year, PRISM members sat in on a conference hosted by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and the president of Uzbekistan, focusing on the country’s “strategic geographic location and its vast minerals resources.” That month, the U.S. announced a multibillion-dollar bilateral minerals and weapons investment deal with Uzbekistan.

The companies seem happy with the arrangement. “PRISM stands as the cornerstone of informed decision-making and international strategic supply chain leadership,” said Greg Bowman, former senior vice president and chief strategy officer of Siemens Government Technologies (SGT), the government arm of German engineering firm Siemens, in promotional materials from PRISM. Bowman, a member of PRISM’s Founding Council, has also served as the chief global policy officer at USA Rare Earth, a metal mining company that earlier this year received a $1.6 billion federal funding deal from Lutnick’s Commerce Department, through loans set aside under the Biden-era CHIPS Act, passed to backstop U.S. semiconductor production.

PRISM’s website specifically talks about “leverag[ing]” Kristi Rogers’s experience and expertise to assist corporate clients. If he were to win his Senate race, her husband would be among the key contacts Ms. Rogers could tap.

Mike Rogers, who served seven terms in the House of Representatives, including as a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee and as chair of the Intelligence Committee, would likely have significant overlap with the legislative priorities of the businesses Ms. Rogers now shepherds.

“It does pose a direct and substantial conflict of interest once Rogers gets into office,” said Craig Holman, a congressional ethics expert at the watchdog group Public Citizen. “If he were to get elected, he would then fall under the Senate ethics rules that would prohibit him from participating in any official matter that would provide a direct and substantial benefit to him or his spouse, or any company associated with his spouse.”

The Rogers campaign and PRISM did not respond to requests for comment.

It’s not the first time Ms. Rogers’s private-sector activities have raised ethics concerns for their potential overlap with her husband’s political life. Earlier this month, Drop Site News reported on Ms. Rogers’s prior role at private security contractor Aegis LLC, which in 2011 won a $1 billion contract to safeguard the U.S. embassy in Kabul, just months after Mr. Rogers became chair of the House Intelligence Committee. The Rogers campaign told Drop Site that “the accusation that Mike used his position in Congress to protect his family in any way, shape, or form is patently false,” and earlier this month the campaign demanded that the publication retract the story, which they have not. The Rogers campaign also issued a cease-and-desist letter to the El-Sayed campaign, in an effort to bar the candidate from discussing the story in public.