Governors' Biofuels Coalition

That’s not counting some international arrangements, like the Trumpadministration’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.

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.