Trump's government-as-VC experiment: $27 billion in corporate equity stakes with almost no public accounting

The United States government holds a 9.9 percent stake in Intel, $400 million in rare-earth miner MP Materials, a "golden share" in U.S. Steel, and positions in quantum computing firms. The Trump administration has deployed roughly $26.7 billion across 30 equity or quasi-equity deals, according to a Fortune investigation published July 26 1. Washington does not keep a single record of what it owns. Jonathan Hillman, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has been cataloguing the holdings on his own because no federal office has claimed the job 1.

The Intel deal is the template. On August 22, 2025, Intel announced that the government would invest $8.9 billion in common stock, funded by $5.7 billion in previously awarded but unspent CHIPS and Science Act grants plus $3.2 billion from the Pentagon's Secure Enclave program. The Department of Commerce received 433.3 million newly issued shares at $20.47 each 2. The stake is passive: no board seat, no information rights, and the government agreed to vote with Intel's board on most matters 2.

What vanished in the transaction matters as much as what was created. Intel called the change "permanency of capital" 2. CHIPS Act grants came with strings. If Intel missed milestones, the government could recover money. Equity does not work that way. If the stock collapses, taxpayers absorb the loss with no mechanism to get anything back.

Trump described the bargaining during a July 2 CNBC interview. He said Intel approached his administration while struggling, and he made a direct demand for ownership. "I said, I can solve your problem, but I want 10% of the company" 3. He claimed the government had earned $60 to $70 billion on the position in eight months 3. Fortune, drawing on Intel's securities filings, places the stake's total market value at $42 billion 1.

Beyond Intel, the portfolio becomes harder to see. When the government takes equity in private firms like Vulcan Elements and xLight, there are no SEC filings to consult 1. The 30 known deals are distributed unevenly across at least four federal bodies. The Commerce Department carries the largest load, with 17. Defense follows with seven. The Development Finance Corporation, which Congress created in 2018 to finance projects in developing countries, holds six. The Department of Energy accounts for two. Of these four, only the DFC was built with statutory authority to own equity 1. Fortune asked Treasury how the public can track these holdings. A spokesperson said there is no standard template: each agency follows the disclosure rules embedded in whatever law authorized its deals 1. Some of the 30 arrangements are preliminary commitments rather than binding contracts, including a batch of about nine quantum computing investments that Commerce rolled out within one week 1.

The accounting gap runs deeper than missing paperwork. The federal budget treats every committed dollar as spent, regardless of what it purchased. The system has no mechanism for logging what those shares are worth later, or for recording any return on the investment 1. Hillman told Fortune that the announced deals are "only the tip of the iceberg" 1.

There is one precedent for the federal government owning corporate equity at this scale, and it came with guardrails. When Congress authorized $700 billion for the Troubled Asset Relief Program during the 2008 financial crisis, it attached multiple layers of scrutiny: a dedicated inspector general reporting to lawmakers every quarter, a separate bipartisan oversight commission, and standing audits from the Government Accountability Office. Even that apparatus fell short. In 2009, TARP's own inspector general told Congress that taxpayers were not being told what recipients were doing with their money 1. None of that infrastructure exists today.

After the Intel deal closed, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett framed the stakes on CNBC as "like a down payment on a sovereign wealth fund" 1. A sovereign wealth fund, done seriously, requires professional management, transparent reporting, and a framework for what happens when investments fail. The current portfolio has none of those things. When the next deal sours, the problem will not be the loss itself. It will be that nobody outside the room knew what the government was holding.