The Trump Administration Is Taking Stakes In More Companies — And Progressives Are Taking Notes

The Trump administration is shaking up federal involvement in the mining, tech, energy and defense sectors by making the government part-owner of dozens of U.S. companies -- and sparking a conversation among progressives about how a future Democratic president might reboot the party’s approach to climate and labor policy.

Starting with Trump’s surprise moves to take a “golden share” in U.S. Steel and then a 10 percent share in Intel more than a year ago, the administration is approaching $30 billion in equity stakes, warrants or similar plans in U.S. companies by most estimates, a fairly radical departure from orthodoxy outside of times of financial crisis — like the massive government bailouts of 2008-2009 — or world war.

That’s not counting some international arrangements, like the Trump administration’s Aug. 28 announcement that it would take a stake in the Venezuelan oil industry, which it said will be engineered by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital.

The new approach has sparked a mixture of support, criticism and confusion across both parties, with libertarian conservatives pointing out the irony of Trump's attacks on Democrats as communists and some elected Democrats pledging to investigate equity stake arrangements involving ties to Trump family or allies if they win back power in the midterms. Critics dispute the administration’s authority to take equity stakes in private companies at all.

But many Democrats, including some former Biden administration officials working outside the government, also see an opening, now that Trump has managed to cross what was long viewed as a political red line: Putting the government in business with specific companies, influencing their governance and literally letting taxpayers share in the upside — or the downside.

They’re encouraging Democrats to explore what an equity-stakes approach might look like — albeit with more guardrails and coordination and transparency, they say – particularly as they grapple with the aftermath of Trump’s dismantling of large chunks of the Biden climate agenda, including the Inflation Reduction Act.

“The devil is in the details on how to structure these agreements so that they make sense for the public. … If you do have public money invested in a certain company or a certain industry, how does that affect the incentives for regulating that company's conduct, right?” says Bharat Ramamurti, who served as deputy director of President Joe Biden’s National Economic Council from 2021 to 2023. “There are trade-offs that we have to work through. But, you know, the argument that this is the equivalent of nationalizing these companies or socialism, I think, is pretty silly.”

Ramamurti predicts fiscal pressures are going to result in more such arrangements.

A July report from the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank run by Elizabeth Wilkins, former chief of staff to Biden antitrust chief Lina Khan, argued that by taking government stakes in companies and securing seats with voting rights on corporate boards, the government could ensure that those companies actually deliver on the climate, energy and labor goals a Democratic president might pursue. And they could do so at far less government expense, more quickly than in the traditional federal grant and loan process, and with more political and economic upside than they got from the IRA.

Todd Tucker, the group’s director of industrial and trade policy, says that Trump’s early move to demand some corporate governance power in U.S. Steel amid its takeover by Nippon Steel – not an equity stake, but still a highly unusual degree of influence in a company – was “pretty ingenious” and mirrored concepts that had been debated in the early days of the Biden administration, and in proposals from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

“Fast forward now, of course, there’s dozens of deals across a whole wide range of sectors that vary a lot between each other,” Tucker says. “But I think [it] normalized this idea, you know, which I think again, sort of before 2024, I associated a lot with Bernie Sanders.”

The conversation comes as different wings of the party seek to shape the fast-evolving race for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, and as Democrats’ explicit focus on climate has been subsumed by the party’s intense focus on energy prices and affordability.

The Trump administration hasn’t detailed a full list of federal incentives that involved the government taking equity stakes or warrants, or similar arrangements. The Commerce Department press office, responsible for the bulk of these deals, did not respond to requests for comment.

But according to Jonathan Hill, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who has been tracking federal government announcements in detail, the administration has announced 38 such arrangements, totaling $27.7 billion in equity stakes, since January of 2025. That includes Commerce Department plans announced in May to extend a total of just over $2 billion to nine companies — including IBM — working on quantum computing, in return for a “minority, non-controlling equity stake” in each firm.

The administration’s involvement in these firms is miniscule compared to the massive stakes that the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations took and managed in hundreds of U.S. banks, automakers and other companies in the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and automaker bailouts during the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009.

But unlike TARP or the auto bailouts, these agreements are aimed at long-term industrial policy, like strengthening critical mineral supply chains and helping the United States dominate AI and emerging technology like quantum computing — and companies like MP Materials and Trilogy Metals in the critical minerals space and Global Foundries and Rigetti in quantum computing.

The fast-evolving strategy across the Commerce, Energy and Defense departments is adding a distinctly investment-banking vibe to some conversations about federal aid and assistance to a variety of industries. The Pentagon has been actively recruiting investment specialists to join OSC — which was created during the Biden administration, underscoring the broader ethos it’s bringing to government assistance conversations in sectors key to defense, tech and energy.

San Francisco-based Clark Street Associates, which helps tech companies navigate the federal assistance process, earlier this year started a partnership with Finalis, a broker-dealer platform for investment bankers, to help companies facilitate equity deals, notes CEO Steve Empedocles. Clark Street helped Oklahoma-based critical minerals form USA Rare Earth close a $1.6 billion deal involving a government equity stake with the Commerce Department in June.

“The government and equity worlds have always been completely sectored. Government is the realm of lobbyists and government insiders. Equity is the realm of Wall Street,” Empedocles says. “Last year, when equity started coming in, it was a new beast for everyone.”

Critics say Trump officials are stretching the authority of federal agencies; an ongoing shareholder lawsuit alleges that administration’s decision to use the Biden-era CHIPS program to give Intel assistance while taking a 10 percent stake was illegal.

Some Democrats had previously pondered a more explicitly equity stake-focused approach to CHIPS; as Congress was debating the legislation in 2021-22, Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tried to include language that would require the Treasury Department to take government stakes in semiconductor firms in return for government aid. Their amendment was not adopted. 

In the Roosevelt Institute’s report, Lenore Palladino, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, argues that the government gave away too much of its leverage nearly two decades ago when taking stakes in companies like General Motors during the financial crises.

“If the government had taken a public equity stake when it bailed out GM during the financial crisis, and kept the share since then,” she writes, “the government could have stayed involved as an active shareholder and promoted the public interest in the electric vehicle transition.”

Some progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have long advocated the government taking equity stakes in companies key to a green transition.

But the concept may be gaining traction among other prominent Democrats, particularly in the realm of artificial intelligence.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 contender, slammed Trump’s Intel deal a year ago, saying at a POLITICO event that it “sickened him to the core” and that “people would have been outraged” if Joe Biden had done something similar. “Nationalization of private industries is something they’re pretty good at in China,” he added.

But Newsom earlier this summer proposed giving the American public shares in the largest AI companies through a “public equity fund” — something that Sanders, the longtime leader of the party’s progressive wing, proposed a version of earlier this year.

An early test may be how Democrats approach the Trump administration’s equity investments if they gain back down in the 2026 midterms — whether they seek target specific cases where they see ethical or legal problems, or pursue a broad rollback of the administration’s approach.

The Council on Foreign Relations’ Hill, who worked as an adviser to former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo from 2023-34, says he hopes that a few years from now, policymakers “come out on the other end with something closer to a portfolio-level, whole-of-government approach to making these investments,” that’s more transparent.

"So I hope the Democrats look at this and say: ‘This is just one tool in the toolkit. We may not agree with how it's being used in all cases. But rather than abandon the tool, let's think about how to use it more effectively,’” he said.

To Ramamurti, a critical question is “how do you do it in a way that it doesn't become just a tool for either self-enrichment or for advancing your own political goals and political allies?”

“It’s good that people are spending time thinking through these questions, because … inevitably a Democratic president is going to get handed these equity stakes at some point,” he said, “and needs to figure out what to do with them.”