Donald Trump’s signature “Gold Card” visa program has been running since December, promising wealthy foreigners a fast lane to U.S. residency. So far, it has cleared exactly one applicant.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made the disclosure on Thursday during testimony before a House Appropriations subcommittee. According to CBS News, Lutnick told lawmakers: “They have approved, recently, one person, and there are hundreds in the queue.” He did not name the approved individual, and the Commerce Department declined to comment further.
The number stands in sharp contrast to the early momentum Lutnick himself described. When applications opened in December, he announced the program had already sold $1.3 billion “worth” of cards within days, with Trump holding up the gilded card and calling it “essentially the green card on steroids.” At a cabinet meeting last year, Lutnick also projected the program would eventually raise $1 trillion in revenue and help “balance the budget,” NBC News reported.
Who applied and why only one was approved
Lutnick defended the slow pace at Thursday’s hearing, saying the administration “wanted to make sure they did it perfectly” and that the vetting process is “the most serious … in the history of government.” The application process was only recently finalized with the Department of Homeland Security, which formally oversees the program.
TP-Link Systems founder Jeffrey Chao had applied and was awaiting a decision. At the time, the Commerce Department was separately investigating his company’s ties to China.
Each applicant pays a non-refundable $15,000 processing fee on top of the $1 million donation to the U.S. government. Corporations can also sponsor a foreign-born employee through the program for $2 million, plus a 1% annual maintenance fee. The Gold Card is positioned as a replacement for the EB-5 visa program, a decades-old route that gave residency to foreign nationals who invested roughly $1 million and created at least 10 jobs.
What the money goes toward
When Rep. Grace Meng, a Democrat from New York, pressed Lutnick on how the donations would be used, he offered a vague answer. “That will be determined by the administration,” he said, “and its terms are for the betterment of the United States of America.”
The program’s official website, trumpcard.gov, promotes it with the tagline “Unlock life in America” and features Trump’s image next to a bald eagle and the Statue of Liberty. A $5 million “Trump Platinum Card” is also in the works, which would allow holders up to 270 days in the U.S. annually without being taxed on income earned outside the country.
The Gold Card program puts Trump in similar territory to dozens of other countries, including the UK, Spain, and Australia, which offer comparable “golden visa” programs to high-net-worth individuals. The broader tensions in that picture are hard to miss: Trump has built a significant part of his political identity around cracking down on immigration, while simultaneously championing legal pathways for wealthy foreign nationals. Those contradictions are already shaping how his energy and economic policies intersect with household costs and broader governance debates, including a recent federal court ruling that dismissed Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal.
