There's a tax break in the federal code called the opportunity zone. Here's the short version of how it works.

You sell something for a profit — stock, a building, a business. Normally you owe capital gains tax on that profit. But if you take the money and put it into a fund that invests inside a government-designated "opportunity zone," you get to put off paying that tax. And if you hold the investment for ten years, the profit you make on that investment comes out completely tax-free.

It was sold to the public as a way to get money flowing into poor neighborhoods.

Tracey Mann doesn't just invest in opportunity zones. According to his own filings with the Clerk of the House, he runs them.

What his financial disclosure actually says

Mann's most recent annual financial disclosure, which he signed on August 1, 2025, has a section near the back listing every organization where he holds a position. Three of the entries are opportunity zone vehicles:

• Manager — Castle Rock QOF, LLC
• Member — AMA Austin QOF, LLC
• Member — Del Monte Partners QOZB, LLC

"QOF" is a Qualified Opportunity Fund. "QOZB" is a Qualified Opportunity Zone Business. Mann's own filing describes Del Monte Partners as a "Qualified Opportunity Zone Business investing in property in Austin, Texas."

He isn't a passive investor who bought into somebody else's fund. He is listed as the manager of one of them.

The properties held through those funds are spelled out too. Del Monte Property 1, Property 2, Property 3, and a parcel called Stiles Cove — all in Austin, Texas.

That's worth sitting with for a second. Mann represents the Big First, the 63-county district covering most of western and central Kansas. Not one opportunity zone property on his disclosure is anywhere near it.

Neither is much of the rest of his real estate. The filing lists rental and development property in Austin, Texas; Liberty, Missouri; Kansas City, Missouri; Merriam, Kansas; and Topeka, Kansas. Merriam is a Kansas City suburb. Topeka is 100 miles east of Salina, where Mann lives. His real estate portfolio is an eastern-Kansas-and-Texas portfolio. The people he represents live west of all of it.

He also carries eight separate commercial real estate loans on that filing — from Keystone Bank, Central Bank of the Midwest, and First National Bank of Syracuse — several of them in the $250,001–$500,000 range.

In 2021, he cosponsored a bill to extend the break. A watchdog called it out.

On June 30, 2021, Mann signed on as a cosponsor of H.R. 970, the Opportunity Zone Extension Act of 2021. Congress's own summary of the bill is one sentence:

"This bill extends for two years the election and capital gain deferral periods for qualified opportunity zones."

That is the exact tax benefit Mann's funds exist to capture.

Mother Jones caught it, and in February 2022 KCUR followed up. Its report noted that Mann's disclosure at the time showed he held as much as $515,000 in opportunity zone ventures.

Donald Sherman, senior vice president and chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, put it plainly:

"Mr. Mann stands to benefit significantly from the extension of these tax benefits. And it's fair to question why he would co-sponsor legislation that has such a significant impact on his own bottom line."

Asked what Mann should do about it, Sherman said selling out of the investments entirely "would be the cleanest and, sort of, the 'highest' standard of ethics."

Mann did not respond to KCUR's request for comment. And he did not take Sherman's advice. Three and a half years later he was still listed as the manager of one opportunity fund and a member of two more entities.

The program's critics say it mostly funds nice buildings

The pitch for opportunity zones was investment in struggling communities. Brett Theodos of the Urban Institute, who studies this program for a living, told KCUR what it turned into:

"It's a really open-ended tax incentive, so you could use it for things that might be considered in the community's interest. But, you can use it for things that you might begin to question why it is that we're subsidizing these as a government. Like, luxury housing, or you know, high end spaces, or other things like self-storage lockers."

There's no requirement that an opportunity zone project help anybody who already lives in the zone. There's no requirement that it create a job. The tax break is the tax break.

Then he voted to make it permanent

The opportunity zone program was written with an expiration date. It was supposed to wind down.

It doesn't anymore.

On July 3, 2025, Mann voted for Trump's budget bill, which passed the House 218 to 214. Buried inside that bill was a rewrite of the opportunity zone rules. The IRS explains the result: the bill made the tax break permanent, scrapping the sunset that would have ended it. Governors start nominating a fresh batch of zones on July 1, 2026, the new map takes effect January 1, 2027, and a new round follows every ten years after that, forever.

A tax shelter that was scheduled to close is now a permanent fixture of the tax code. Mann, who manages a fund built on it, voted yes.

That same bill is the one that cut Medicaid and food assistance. Mann told KSNT in May 2025 that Democrats warning about Medicaid cuts "continue to lie and fearmonger." Then he voted for it anyway.

He is also, as of May 2026, a co-chair of the bipartisan Congressional Real Estate Caucus — a commercial real estate broker by trade, helping steer the House's real estate agenda.

He has filed for a late-disclosure extension every single year

Members of the House have to file an annual report of what they own. It's due May 15. You can ask the Ethics Committee for up to 90 more days.

Mann has asked for the maximum every year he has been in Congress:

Five for five. Every one of them pushed to the last day the rules allow.

Look at what that meant this year. The report covering 2025 — the year he voted to make his own tax break permanent — is due August 13, 2026.

Kansas Republicans voted in their primary on August 5, 2026. Mann won it.

His voters went to the polls eight days before they could see what he owned during the year he cast that vote. Nothing about that is against the rules. He's allowed to ask for the extension, and he asked for it.

But he asked for it every year, always for the full 90 days, always landing after the moment it would have mattered most.

This keeps happening

Mann is not the only one. We've written about Nick Begich, who owns up to $1 million in Bitcoin and then wrote the bill ordering the U.S. Treasury to buy 200,000 coins a year. We've written about Vivek Ramaswamy's plan to wipe out Ohio's capital gains tax, which his own tax returns show would save him roughly $5.8 million.

The pattern is always the same. The policy is described in the language of helping ordinary people — investment in poor neighborhoods, growth, opportunity. The person pushing it happens to be positioned to collect.

Mann has been told about this, by name, by an ethics watchdog, in public, four years ago. He was told the clean move was to get out.

He is still the manager of the fund.

Source

Steve Kraske and Zach Wilson, "U.S. Rep. Tracey Mann of Kansas supports bill that could lead to conflict of interest," KCUR, February 28, 2022. Photo: Ike Hayman / U.S. House of Representatives. Mann's holdings and positions are from his own filings with the Clerk of the House.