Washington Spent Decades Subsidizing Companies Without Owning Them. This Year It Started Taking Equity — Nine Quantum Firms in a Single Day, a Golden Share in Steel. The State Is Back on the Cap Table.
September 25, 2026
For most of the last half-century, when Washington wanted to help a company it wrote a check — a grant, a loan guarantee, a tax credit — and took nothing back but the policy outcome. That changed. Since the middle of 2025 the US government has taken direct equity in a run of companies — Intel, MP Materials, GlobalFoundries, Westinghouse, and more — not funding them, owning pieces of them, filed with the SEC like any other shareholder. Then, on May 21, 2026, the Commerce Department signed roughly $2.013 billion in CHIPS Act equity deals with nine quantum-computing companies on the same day — the same legal template repeated nine times, not nine separate negotiations. And in steel, the government kept a golden share: a standing veto over a private company's decisions. The state is back on the cap table, and it did not arrive as a rescuer. It arrived as an investor.
The rest of this analysis is for Pro and Enterprise members.
You have read the opening. Members get the full piece, with the evidence and sources behind it.