Republican Socialism Is Bad For America · Episode 09
Socialism for Friends: The Insider Ledger
What if the very officials who promise to shrink government were simultaneously arranging for the state to take ownership stakes in private firms? The federal government is taking equity stakes in private firms — and the receipts trace the money and the legal authority.
Every number below traces to a primary receipt. Click through.
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The Story
Start with the number DOGE wants you to remember: $8.5 billion. That's what Reuters tallied from the Department of Government Efficiency's own partial data as of Feb 19, 2025 — "a fraction of what the U.S. government pays contractors each year."
But DOGE's own public "Wall of Receipts" claims something bigger — $110 billion. Congress's own watchdog, the GAO, checked it and found "some savings estimates are incorrect or lack supporting evidence." Reuters has its own description of the outfit behind the number: "the secretive unit operating in the public eye."
While that number was under audit, a different kind of transaction was happening with far less scrutiny. Named, one at a time: DOD took a 10% equity stake in Trilogy Metals, DOE took 5% of Lithium Americas, and DOD became the biggest stakeholder in MP Materials — the only rare-earth mine in the country. By February 2026 the full portfolio read: MP Materials 15% ($400M), Intel 10% ($8.9B via CHIPS), Trilogy Metals 10% ($35.6M), Lithium Americas 5% + warrants, Korea Zinc 10%. The government isn't just regulating these companies anymore. It's a shareholder.
None of this is unprecedented, exactly — it's a rerun. TARP disbursed $443.5B, collected back $425.5B, actual lifetime cost ~$31.1B. The state-as-shareholder playbook isn't new. It's TARP's post-2008 equity stakes, run again — this time without the emergency, and without the vote.
And underneath both storylines — the contested savings and the quiet buying spree — sits FY2025's $7.010 trillion in outlays and a $1.775 trillion deficit. CBO publishes the raw numbers on GitHub, plainly, because "cbo.gov API is Cloudflare-captcha-walled." The receipts are public. Almost nobody goes and reads them.
Receipts: Reuters (Feb 2025) · GAO-26-108615 · Reuters (Mar 2025) · E&E News/POLITICO · CNBC · CBO open data · U.S. Treasury.
The steelman
The strongest counter, aired straight — and it comes from the right, not the left: Reason argues the administration "has not made a convincing case for why it is buying stakes in these companies—and why these companies in particular, rather than others," and that "at a minimum, it should make that case to Congress and get congressional authorization for these purchases." This is a process critique, not a claim that the underlying economics are unsound.
The rebuttal
The process critique is the point. Writing via Dan Mitchell's International Liberty blog, National Review goes further: "Federal stakes also threaten untold economic distortions. Once the government takes a financial interest in a particular company, the interventionism never ends there. Officials use the state's power to privilege their investments over other firms, supplanting the market's role in steering wealth and opportunity… It's the same model that has faltered in China — government directing capital to state-owned and politically favored enterprises — with misallocation costing the country trillions of dollars in missed economic output." A one-time stake taken for a stated emergency, like TARP, has an exit. A standing policy of picking equity winners does not — and the DOGE savings claims used to justify the broader "efficiency" narrative around it are themselves under GAO review.
The savings claim is disputed. The equity stakes are not.
Documents Used to Produce This Episode
No matching research-list documents found for this topic. The 53-list research folders (the-53-list/) cover a different, fixed set of 52 subsidy/tax-expenditure topics (TARP, the CHIPS Act's manufacturing grants, farm subsidies, carried interest, etc.), and none of them is a confident topical match for the 2025–2026 DOGE-savings / critical-minerals-equity-stake story this episode is built on. This episode's facts trace instead to the master script and handoff sources below.
Full production materials (internal — scripts, shot lists, raw renders) →