Elaine Chao

Elaine Chao was born in Taipei, Taiwan, on March 26, 1953, and immigrated to the United States when she was eight years old. She is the eldest of six daughters of Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, a historian from Anhui, and James S. C. Chao, a Shanghainese businessman who began his career as a merchant mariner and in 1964 founded the shipping company Foremost Maritime Corporation in New York City, which developed into the Foremost Group. In 1961, at the age of 8, Chao came to the United States on a 37-day freight ship journey along with her mother and two younger sisters. Her father had arrived in New York three years earlier and sent money home until the rest of the family could join him in the United States.

Chao described her early life in America as a typical immigrant story, noting that "everything was foreign to us: the culture, people, language, traditions, and even the food." She spoke no English upon her arrival. Her father "worked three jobs" to support the family and the then-five family members lived in a one-bedroom apartment.

Education

Chao attended Tsai Hsing Elementary School in Taiwan for kindergarten and first grade. She attended Syosset High School in Syosset, New York, in Nassau County on Long Island and was naturalized as a U.S. citizen at the age of 19.

Chao received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. In the second semester of her junior year, she studied at Dartmouth College. She received an MBA degree from Harvard Business School.

Early career

Before being appointed to government work, Chao was a vice president for syndications at Bank of America Capital Markets Group in San Francisco, and she was an international banker at Citicorp in New York. She was granted a White House Fellowship during the Reagan Administration.

In 1986, Chao became Deputy Administrator of the Maritime Administration in the U.S. Department of Transportation. From 1988 to 1989, she served as chairwoman of the Federal Maritime Commission. In 1989, then-president George H.W. Bush nominated Chao to be Deputy Secretary of Transportation; she served from 1989 to 1991. From 1991 to 1992, she was the director of the Peace Corps. She was the first Asian American to serve in any of these positions. She expanded the Peace Corps' presence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia by establishing the first Peace Corps programs in Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, including the first Peace Corps programs in Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and Russia.

In 1993, Chao married Mitch McConnell, U.S. Senator from Kentucky.

The University of Louisville's Ekstrom Library opened the "McConnell-Chao Archives" in November 2009. It is a major component of the university's McConnell Center.

From July 2022 onward, Trump had criticized McConnell's leadership on social media and directed attacks at Chao, including calling her "Coco Chow," which was widely condemned as racist. In a statement to Politico in January 2023, Chao said that people had "deliberately misspelled or mispronounced my name. Asian Americans have worked hard to change that experience for the next generation. He doesn't seem to understand that, which says a whole lot more about him than it will ever say about Asian Americans."

Chao was traveling in China for a long-planned philanthropic visit when her husband experienced cardiac arrest and was hospitalized on June 14, 2026. She returned to the US on July 7. Her spokesperson said, "The Senator's health did not warrant an immediate return to the US."

In 2013, Super PAC Progress Kentucky stated in a tweet that Chao was Mitch McConnell's "Chinese wife" and that this "[m]ay explain why your job moved to China", linking to conspiracy theorist and radio host Jeff Rense's website. After being criticized by Democrats and Republicans for racially insensitive tweets, Progress Kentucky apologized and deleted them. In 2014, the owner of a Democratic political consulting firm in Northern Kentucky responded to Mitch McConnell's remarks at a Republican breakfast by posting in her personal Twitter account that Chao "isn't from KY, she is Asian". The Kentucky Democratic Party denounced the tweet, and the owner deleted her Twitter account.

Critics have claimed that the Chao family's shipping company, Foremost Group, has ties to China. From January 2018 to April 2019, 72% of the total tonnage of chartered cargo shipped by Foremost was shipped to and from China. During Mitch McConnell's reelection campaign in 2020, his Democratic opponent Amy McGrath accused McConnell of making "millions from China". The Washington Post called these claims "spurious" and rated them "three Pinocchios" out of a possible four, remarking that, although McConnell is one of the wealthiest senators in Congress, "The story of how McConnell got rich has nothing to do with Chinese trade deals, spycraft or the coronavirus. He simply married into a higher tax bracket."

As Secretary of Transportation, Chao appeared in at least a dozen interviews with her 96-year-old father, James, the founder of her family's shipping company. Some media outlets said the appearances raised ethical concerns, as public officials are prohibited from using their office to profit others or themselves; a report by the Transportation Department's Inspector General, released in March 2021, cited multiple instances where Chao's office had helped to promote her family's shipping business. The Inspector General had asked the Trump administration's Justice Department in December 2020 to consider a criminal investigation into Chao, but the DOJ denied the request. Federal disclosures cited by The New York Times revealed a gift to Chao and her husband from Chao's father in 2017 valued between $5 million and $25 million.

Chao pledged in 2017 to divest into cash the "deferred stock units" (non-transferrable stock equivalents) she had earned while she was on the board of directors of Vulcan Materials by April 2018. After the Wall Street Journal and other major news outlets reported in late May 2019 that she was still holding the stock, worth $250,000 to $500,000, she sold it on June 3, 2019, for a gain of $50,000 since April 2018; a report by the Inspector General did "not identify any evidence of a financial conflict of interest".

An October 2018 Politico analysis found that Chao had more than 290 hours of appointments which were labelled as "private" during working hours on working days in the first 14 months of her tenure as Secretary of Transportation, which former Department of Transportation officials described as unusual. DoT officials stated that the "private" labeling existed to help ensure Chao's security.

In June 2019, Politico reported that in 2017 Chao had designated her aide Todd Inman as a special liaison "to help with grant applications and other priorities" for Transportation Department projects in the state of Kentucky, the only state to have such a liaison. Inman was to act as an intermediary between the department, local Kentucky officials, and Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, who is Chao's husband. This resulted in grants of at least $78 million for projects in Mitch McConnell strongholds Boone County and Owensboro. Inman had worked on the 2008 and 2014 re-election campaigns of McConnell; McConnell and local officials brought up the grants when he announced in Owensboro in December 2018 that he was running for re-election in 2020. Inman later became Chao's chief of staff. However, the Inspector General "did not find any irregularities" with respect to grants benefitting Kentucky and saw awards to Kentucky that were "consistent with other States' results" and "did not find evidence of steering" and concluded that the investigation "did not uncover evidence that Mr. Inman influenced grant awards benefiting Kentucky or gave Kentucky applicants an improper advantage".

In May 2020, the Trump administration removed the acting Inspector General of the Transportation Department, Mitch Behm. Behm, who was not a political appointee, was conducting an investigation into whether Secretary Elaine Chao was giving preferential treatment to projects in Kentucky. Her husband, Mitch McConnell, is the Senator of Kentucky and faced a re-election bid at the time. Trump appointed Howard "Skip" Elliott as interim Inspector General of the Transportation Department to replace Behm. However, at the same time, Elliott served as the head of one of the DoT's agencies, a role where Chao was his boss. Thus, Elliott had been put in charge of an office that was investigating his own actions and those of Chao.

In September 2019, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform began an investigation into whether she used political office to benefit her family's business interests. A September 16 letter from the Oversight committee to Chao documented allegations that the Department of Transportation was forced to cancel a trip to China in 2017 that Chao had planned to take because State Department ethics officials challenged her attempts to include her family members in official meetings with the Chinese government. The trip was canceled due to scheduling issues and no ethics charges were sustained.

On March 4, 2021, the Inspector General released their report regarding numerous ethics violations, including using department resources for personal errands and for promoting her father's biography. It also stated that it had referred its investigation to the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington D.C. for criminal prosecution in December 2020. Both declined to open criminal investigations into Chao.