A teeny fraction of American households doesn’t have a bank account. One such household might belong to the man second in line for the presidency: House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Johnson’s recent launch from obscure congressional backbencher to one of the most powerful people in the country has come with a wave of scrutiny. Reporters are combing through his past and finding weird stuff – his curious arrangement with his son to monitor each other’s digital devices for porn, for instance.

One less salacious but perhaps more consequential discovery involves his finances. In his most recent annual financial disclosures, released last year, Johnson (R-La.) reports no assets at all.

Zero.

There are no retirement accounts, no money-market funds, no stocks, no crypto, not even a basic checking or savings account. Even more peculiar, his disclosures have never listed any checking or savings accounts, on any of the forms he’s filed going back to 2016, the year he was elected to Congress.

This is confusing. Where is his congressional salary being deposited? How is he paying his bills?

Johnson was asked on Sunday about his lack of a bank account during an interview on Fox News. “I’m a man of modest means,” he replied, deflecting.

He said that he had previously worked at nonprofits. He noted that he also has either four or five children (which is a whole other story). “We have a lot of expenses,” he said, citing multiple tuition bills for those kids. He then pivoted to talking about his upbringing as the son of a firefighter, and declared that these humble financial circumstances help him “relate to every hard-working American family.” The Fox News anchor asked no follow-up questions.

This bizarre exchange raises more questions than it answers. Like, how is he paying those school tuition fees? With cash he keeps under his mattress? Sacks of doubloons?

The speaker’s office did not respond to multiple queries I sent about Johnson’s financial disclosures. But the disclosures do leave a few possibilities, all of them concerning.

He could be totally “unbanked,” which seems improbable. The unbanked are disproportionately very low-income – people who can’t make minimum balance requirements or afford bank fees. Rank-and-file federal representatives, by contrast, draw a sizable congressional salary of $174,000 (which gets bumped up to $223,500 for the speaker).

That’s not Johnson’s only income, either, as he earns another $30,000 annually for teaching at Liberty University. His wife receives multiple salaries, too; the exact amounts of her salaries were not disclosed in Johnson’s most recent financial reports, but based on prior years’ data, the household is likely pulling in at least $211,000 total. That’s close to the 90th percentile. And note that other members of Congress of “modest” backgrounds still somehow report having bank accounts.

The speaker could simply be hiding financial assets. But lying on this congressional disclosure document would be a federal offense, and so that too seems unlikely – particularly given the innocuousness of the information. Why pretend you don’t have a bank account when 95 percent of households have one?

Perhaps he has only a non-interest-bearing bank account, which would not have to be disclosed, according to House ethics rules. This would be a strange financial choice, especially in an inflationary environment, but it’s possible.

More likely, he has bank balances that are so low that they’re below the required reporting threshold – which is $1,000 for any given account, so long as the combined value of all bank accounts (including those of spouses and dependent children) is over $5,000.

What could be happening here, experts told me, is that the speaker has been living hand to mouth. That is, whatever money comes in could be going right out the door.

Those reporting thresholds only matter for a brief snapshot in time: the account’s balance at the end of the calendar year. So, if a savings account exists and was flush on Dec. 1 but got cleaned out by Dec. 31, he doesn’t have to disclose it in these annual filings, explains Jordan Libowitz, communications director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group.

Libowitz notes another detail supporting this hypothesis: When Johnson first came into office, he had a retirement account. That account has since disappeared, while he’s taken out another loan.

“The retirement fund was slowly going up and is now gone, which kind of points to having money problems,” Libowitz says.

People of all levels of income have money troubles, of course, and it’s usually no one’s business. But those who hold the public trust are different. Whether it’s the leader of the free world or the leader of the people’s house, the public has a right to know whether their elected officials are facing serious financial difficulties – particularly ones that might make them targets for unsavory characters and influence-buying or that might tempt them to misuse campaign funds. This is not exactly unprecedented.

This is why we have financial disclosures in the first place: so Americans can judge whether public servants are truly serving the public interest or their own. If Johnson wants to prove he’s worthy of his unexpected promotion, he’ll stop punting and start answering questions about what’s really happening with his finances.

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Reach Catherine Rampell at crampell@washpost.com.