Here’s the joke that isn’t really a joke: the administration that spent a decade warning voters about creeping socialism has quietly built the U.S. government into a shareholder in 30 private companies, with more on the way, and nobody in Washington can tell you exactly where the money is or who’s overseeing it.
THE NUMBERS
Since taking office, the Trump administration has negotiated equity stakes in 30 companies worth roughly $26.7–27 billion combined, according to the Council on Foreign Relations and a separate tally from the Cato Institute. Seven more deals — all AI supply-chain companies including GlobalFoundries, Kepler, and Multibeam Corporation — have already signed letters of intent, meaning the portfolio keeps growing.
The headline holding is the government’s 9.9% stake in Intel, originally converted from an $8.9 billion CHIPS Act grant. That stake has appreciated 372% and was worth $42 billion as of late July — a genuinely staggering taxpayer windfall on paper, and also a genuinely staggering amount of leverage for the federal government to hold over a single private semiconductor company’s future decisions. Beyond Intel: an 8% stake in nuclear power company Westinghouse, a “golden share” in U.S. Steel retained as a condition of its Nippon Steel sale, a $400 million stake in rare-earth miner MP Materials, stakes in at least five different rare-earth companies at 5–15% each, a $150 million stake in Louisiana gallium company ATALCO, and a growing list of quantum computing and semiconductor startups.
WHY THIS ISN’T JUST IRONIC — IT’S ACTUALLY DANGEROUS
Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute — a libertarian think tank, not a left-leaning one, which matters for who’s raising this alarm — put it plainly: “Perhaps most striking about the announcement is how unremarkable government ownership is becoming.” Cato’s broader analysis lays out the real structural problem: the federal government is now simultaneously acting as regulator, customer, financier, and shareholder of the same companies. That means the government’s own regulatory decisions, trade policy, and future contracts can directly move the value of its own stock holdings — a conflict of interest that doesn’t go away just because Commerce calls the stakes “minority” and “noncontrolling.” And if one of these portfolio companies starts to fail, Washington now has a built-in incentive to prop it up with more taxpayer money specifically to protect its own investment, rather than letting the market work.
THE TRANSPARENCY PROBLEM
Here’s the part that should worry people regardless of politics: this entire $27 billion portfolio appears in no budget document and is subject to no independent watchdog, per Fortune’s reporting. Nobody outside the administration can point to a single, complete, updated list of what the government owns, what it’s worth today, or who inside the government is actually managing the decisions. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick briefed Senate Republicans on the Intel stake specifically last month, and even they weren’t fully comfortable — Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said “we have to be careful about that,” and Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) voiced similar concern. When Republican senators are the ones cautioning restraint on a Republican administration’s economic policy, that’s a signal worth taking seriously.
THE PUBLIC ISN’T BUYING IT EITHER
CNBC’s latest All-America Economic Survey found about half of Americans now believe it’s inappropriate for the U.S. government to take ownership stakes in private companies at all — a meaningful shift from October 2025, when 56% said the same thing in the opposite direction, before the pace of dealmaking accelerated. Voters are watching the government transform into precisely the kind of state-directed economic actor Republicans spent generations warning was un-American — and they’re growing uneasy about it in real time, across party lines.
THE THROUGH-LINE
Call it state capitalism, call it “taxpayers sharing in the upside,” call it whatever framing the administration prefers — CSIS researchers note it functionally resembles the state-intervention model textbook to countries like China and Russia, not historically the U.S. approach outside genuine financial crises like 2008’s TARP. This isn’t a bailout responding to an emergency. It’s a deliberate, accelerating policy choice, built with no public ledger, no independent oversight, and — per Cato’s own analysis — no clear statutory authority under the CHIPS Act to even be doing it this way in the first place.