What founders need to know about tech’s growing influence in D.C.

Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Daniel Weiner, director of the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program, to break down what this means for startups, innovation, and democracy. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: How SpaceX, Palantir, and Anduril leveraged insider networks to win major defense deals. Changing ethics safeguards, and why that matters for founders entering government spaces. What this all means for fair competition and startups trying to break in. Equity will be back Friday with our weekly news round-up. Don’t miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes here. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner.

• 0:17Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Bala and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Elon Musk has led the charge of Silicon Valley, gaining not just influence in Washington, but a seat at the table. To help us understand how this affects government and the startup ecosystem today, we're joined by Daniel Weiner, Director of the Brennan Center's Elections and Government Program. Daniel, welcome to the show.

• 0:43Speaker 02

  It's so nice to be here with you.

• 0:45Rebecca Bellan?

  I really appreciate you coming to join us. We spoke last week or a couple of weeks ago about how Silicon Valley's influence in Washington is starting to benefit the tech elite as we're seeing employees, allies, investors of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Palmer Lucky, all these kind of big names in tech, taking roles at federal agencies. So I was really excited to have you come on the show to talk a little bit more about that. Before we get into it, give us a little bit of your background. How did you get here?

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Well, I, as you said, work at the Brennan Center for Justice, where I'm Director of our Elections and Government Program. My background's actually in the studying of money in politics. So before I came to the Brennan Center, although these many years ago, I was a senior lawyer at the Federal Election Commission, which is a small federal agency that regulates campaign finance in federal elections. Before that, I'm a lawyer. I was a lawyer in private practice and I studied a number of the issues and worked on issues around the First Amendment and the structure of government. So I've been working on these issues for a while, obviously as the tech sector has

• 1:53Speaker 02

  become more prominent and frankly, also as the communications landscape has changed. I've done more work on the intersection of money in politics and tech and just democracy in tech in general.

• 2:05Rebecca Bellan?

  I think with this election and this current administration, we're seeing a lot of attention paid to Silicon Valley and tech leaders and their role in Washington. Can you speak a little bit about how this is unique and also how it's not that unique?

• 2:18Speaker 02

  So much of what we're dealing with right now, you know, is both unique and then not unique. It does have some precedent. Wealthy industries exercising a huge amount of influence in Washington is not particularly unique. We've had many, many, many periods like this before. Even the role of super PACs and big super PAC donors is not unprecedented. That dates back to a Supreme Court case called Citizens United, which was 15 years ago. And we've had other elections where super PACs played a big role. I think what is unique here, at least is in evolution, is a couple of things. Now, one is that the last election was just so dominated by big election spenders. Elon Musk is the one we hear most about.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  He spent, that we know of, almost $300 million to help President Trump get elected, but he certainly wasn't the only one. A number of these other big tech figures also spent a lot of money on the election. The other thing that's obviously remarkable, right, is that usually when we look at big campaign donors, they're spending money to get influence over public policy, sometimes an ambassadorship or a plum job. It is unusual to see so many of them literally playing a central role in a presidential administration. In the first Trump administration, we saw sort of a more traditional donors trying to exercise influence, but not necessarily run the administration. I think if we had, you know, in the Biden

• 3:46Speaker 02

  administration and if we had seen a Kamala Harris administration, we certainly would have seen a lot of them trying to shape policy. I don't know in any other administration we've seen so many literally in the administration. And historically, you know, the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts back in the Gilded Age had a lot of influence in American politics. They didn't literally have offices in the White House. And then the last thing that I think is worth noting, right, is of course, is the tech sector shapes public discourse in many ways, besides just the sort of campaign advertising that they buy. So the particular moment that we're in where you have concentrated private wealth shaping our politics is also one in

• 4:28Speaker 02

  In which the sources of that wealth dominate political discourse in other ways, too. You have the folks who run our biggest social media platforms, who are also trying to shape public policy, and that's partly because both the tech sector and the American economy in general have become more concentrated. So a company like X also wants to become an e-commerce platform, right? Not just a communications platform. And X is relatively small potatoes compared to Meta and Google and other companies like that. So that does make this moment different than what we've seen before.

• 5:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, absolutely. And some people that I've spoken to about this say, really, what is happening is we're just pulling back the curtain, right? It's, as you say, there's always been this influence lobbying spending kind of proves that as well. There's always been this influence, but as you said, not actually an office in the White House.

• 5:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:21Rebecca Bellan?

  It's just now happening just more in your face. Why is that different?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  One, to be honest, difference, and you could look at this a couple of different ways, but President Trump and the Trump administration approach these things a little bit differently than past presidents. So there is a more sort of explicitly transactional approach to governing. I want to be clear, many of the president's supporters think that's a great thing. They think that it has always happened this way, and these folks at least are honest about it. A different way to look at that, of course, is that normalizing something that maybe went on to some degree sort of further serves to erode those norms that had at least ostensibly meant that government was supposed to be in the public interest.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  And then I think also we're in a period of big technological change when you have these new industries coming in. And I think maybe similar to the early 2000s, there is a sense that policy that is going to make and break vast fortunes is up for grabs. Before coming on, I had someone look up some stats. So the number of groups lobbying on artificial intelligence has just ballooned in recent years, I think almost tripled. There's just a sense that we have a very open policy playing field right now, and a lot of money is at stake. And so a lot of people are coming in and they want to shape policy in ways that advantage them, and that means jumping into the political process.

• 6:49Rebecca Bellan?

  But I think crucially, it's not just shaping policy in ways that advantage their industry. It's specifically their businesses in a lot of ways, right? Like Reuters came out with a report a few days ago that said that Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency has been expanding the use of Grok, which is the chatbot that Musk's AI startup XAI has created, to analyze federal government data. There's all kinds of privacy concerns here, but also conflict of interest concerns, suspected self-dealing. And we're seeing this kind of thing happen a lot, specifically around Elon Musk, but also around some of the people in his orbit.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I get asked a lot of times, is the government's focus on, say, AI, is that being driven by money and politics because these people are spending so much money? And my honest answer is, the government would be thinking a lot about AI, even if no one spent a red cent on campaigns. But how the government approaches these issues, who gets the contract, who is in the room where the decisions are being made? Money infuses that aspect of the political process a lot. And it is true that Musk and others, and Drisen, you know, a lot of these big figures, some of whom, unlike Musk, are not household names. Part of what the dynamic is, is that they want to be in the room when some of these

• 8:04Speaker 02

  big decisions are made. I want to emphasize that it is not just to impact their own bottom line. So though clearly, like, they have a lot of money at stake, it's also because a number of these people have strong views about how public policy should be made in this area, and more broadly, frankly, how government should be run. And that is one of the sort of dynamics that we see in this moment when private wealth has so much influence in our politics. It is both used sort of in a narrow sense to advance people's bottom lines, but then also, and this is something you and I talked about in the written piece, it's used to advance the very wealthiest people's particular views of how government should handle some of the biggest problems that we are facing today, which, in the tech center in particular,

• 8:48Speaker 02

  they tend to be fairly self-confident in their views of the world, and they very much want government in some ways to mirror their approach to organizational management and to tackling some of these big problems around AI and other technological developments.

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• 9:48Rebecca Bellan?

  There's two things that that brings up for me when we talk about how these extremely wealthy individuals want to shape how government is run. One of them is that among the Peter Thiel's and the Blas Esternevaas's of the world, there is the network effect, right? The idea that there should be kind of like a parallel government that's being beta-tested on the side that will eventually replace the current democratic norms that we have today. And it's a very self-serving libertarian point of view that's eerily gaining ground, I think, in the US now. But then also, the second thing that brings up for me is just because you've exited a few successful startups, you probably failed a ton of other ones, whether you're an investor

• 10:27Rebecca Bellan?

  or a founder, that doesn't make you necessarily poised to understand how to run a government that's different stakeholders are involved.

• 10:36Anthony Ha?

  Right.

• 10:37Rebecca Bellan?

  Like, you can't move fast and break things with public policy, is kind of what we've been hearing since Doge came about and started trying to move fast and break things as it tries to reduce government spending.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  It's such a hard thing, because something that frustrates a lot of us who are temperamentally pro-innovation and also don't necessarily think the government does everything right all the time, is that there's a concept like Doge that is not ipso facto a terrible idea, right? But it is being run, as far as I can tell, by people who don't have very much familiarity with government. And I think you hit the nail on the head. Startup culture... Move fast and break things may be great for putting out a new app or even building a very successful company, but not great for distributing tens of millions of people's social security checks. And there are real people with real interests at stake.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  I think that you are seeing, now it may be receding a little bit, but this idea that the culture of Silicon Valley, the culture of the tech sector should just sort of take over government and that'll be great. And there'll be whatever downside, well, we can fix it momentarily. Again, I worry about that because a missed social security check because someone decided that they were gonna, you know, put some new system in place, right, that didn't work, is a very big deal for a lot of people. And again, we have had other big ideologically motivated donors who've thought that they had ideas about how the government should run. We have not necessarily had them literally put in charge of vast swaths of the government.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  And that, I think, is what's concerning for a lot of people. The tragedy is that our government is technologically out of date in many respects. It could be more efficient. There is a world in which this could be a valuable initiative, but not put in place the way it has been put in place.

• 12:32Rebecca Bellan?

  Right. Of course, none of us is gonna say, oh, we think government's been running great the way it is and that we shouldn't cut some of this red tape, that we shouldn't introduce technology to make everything run more efficiently. Obviously, all those things are great. And who else knows better than the people at some of these firms run by these top Silicon Valley leaders and is able to kind of implement that? But when you remove the safeguards that protect against breaking privacy rules or conflict of interest laws, when you remove those safeguards and when you have a culture of pardoning tech leaders already, including Trevor Milton from Nikola, when we talk about, for example, Elon Musk's Doge using Grok, if this gives the appearance of self-dealing,

• 13:14Rebecca Bellan?

  that Doge is pressuring agencies to use XAI's software to benefit XAI, not the American people, then that could possibly lead to jail time. There's all kinds of things this could lead to. But is there a world in which we see Elon Musk or anyone involved with this being punished for their actions?

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Well, there's a lot there around government ethics and money in politics. And I think this was not something that is the responsibility of Mr. Musk. But we have seen this increasing sort of culture of impunity. And part of it is that there's been a breakdown of enforcement in a lot of these laws around conflicts of interest, around campaign spending and contribution restrictions. What's fascinating to me is that someone like Mr. Musk, who actually does have a lot of valuable companies that produce real things, would want to have more safeguards in place because there might be actual reasons the government would want to use his companies for things.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  But the sort of rampant conflicts of interest creates a lot of questions about what government is doing and whether it is in the public interest. You mentioned data. I mean, that's a huge one, right? For so many tech leaders to be so ensconced in the government when the currency of the realm for many, many tech companies is access to people's personal data. This is an enormous, enormous problem. And it casts a shadow both on the things they're doing in government and potentially on the industry, the things that they are doing in private industry. We have a problem, which is that the laws, conflict of interest rules, they, in theory and on paper, carry some pretty stiff penalties.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  It is very rare that people get prosecuted. And part of it is actually that the systems are so rigid that basically either nothing happens to you or you might go to prison. But there's no sort of system of more kind of balanced penalties, right? For just maybe carelessness or recklessness. That's something that we need to address sort of as a long-term question of government reform. But I do think what has put new stress on the system, right? Is having so many of these people literally in government and having so many, frankly, just billionaires overseeing vast sectors of policy that do impact their bottom lines. And that creates questions whether or not actually they are trying to advantage themselves.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  I mean, Musk now says he's lost money from being in government, partly because people don't want to buy Teslas anymore. So again, it is the perception of government being bought that is very, very dangerous. I think both ironically, both for the government and for some of these companies whose leaders are so enmeshed now in the administration.

• 16:01Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. I'm curious how you think it affects the tech world, right? Like, you know, for example, with the data thing and the fact that it's a privacy issue. I spoke to some investors about my concerns about data being shared past Doge with the private sector, and they kind of waved it off. They were like, well, China has all that data anyway. Everyone's already got your data. Like, it's, forget about having data privacy, it doesn't exist. We know why it's bad for the average American. It's not clear why it's bad for the tech world necessarily, considering that these people are pushing tech interests, or at least ostensibly they are.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  A couple of thoughts on that. And I mean, I am not necessarily in the tech world, although I work adjacent to it and I know a lot of people in the tech world. But I don't think to have concentrated private interests have so much political power is great for our economy, first of all, right? It's shaping a lot of decisions that might be good for particular companies, but are not necessarily good for the sector or the industry. So you have Meta and Google and now, you know, maybe X and other companies trying very hard to shape policy that makes the climate better for them. It might not be better for other tech companies competing with them.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  And I mean, the example that comes up a lot here, of course, is antitrust. So you've got vast concentrations of wealth in a few companies that have long track records, frankly, of trying to either buy or stamp out their competition. If you don't have aggressive antitrust enforcement, or if you have these decisions being skewed, that's not actually going to be great for other companies and potentially other innovators. I also think, frankly, for the sector to be associated so much with one administration and one particular approach to governing is also questionable. I mean, and different people have different views on this, but you have seen, for instance, the crypto industry, which I'm amazed we've gotten this far into an interview and we haven't

• 18:03Speaker 02

  talked about them at all, because they're on the tip of everyone's tongue.

• 18:06Rebecca Bellan?

  Don't even know where to start with that.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  Well, there's a lot to say about that, but one thing is, you know, during During the election, I think there was actually a very vigorous debate within the crypto industry about how much they should be supporting one side or the other and how partisan they should be. You now have, I think, the crypto industry quite strongly associated with this administration, this president, and also frankly, some of the more outlandish troubling things that have happened, like the dinner for crypto donors to the Trump coin platform. I don't know whether that is, I can't speak for the tech industry. I don't know whether that's in their long-term best interests, right? Because there are serious questions about these industries that are being skewed now by maybe a particular company or set of companies' narrower sort of self-dealing.

• 18:52Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, cryptos, sometimes I get the sense that they have their own little pocket in Silicon Valley world. I mean, it certainly does overlap, but they have, yeah, I mean, I can't even get into the Trump meme coin situation.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Well, the idea that the president can own a meme coin that people can buy, and it's basically non-fungible, that's perfectly legal, right? Of course, makes a lot of people's jaws drop. That is a gap in the law that, you know, what the president is doing with his meme coin, what his businesses are doing is somewhat shocking to a lot of people. But as a lawyer, I can tell you, it's not necessarily illegal because the president is exempt from all of these laws. Recent presidents have just voluntarily complied because it was the idea of people should believe and know the president is working for the interests of the American people. Again, this president's approach to governing is different. I have enough humility to recognize that a lot of his supporters think that that's fine,

• 19:48Speaker 02

  but that is the moment we're in right now, right? Where that's happening and crypto is a big part of that story.

• 19:53Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, certainly, there's a lot of erosion of other norms. You know, a lot of that is based on people being, whether they're well-informed or not, okay with it. And that has some follow-on effects that'll touch everyone from, you know, your grandma to the next startup founder that's trying to compete against an incumbent and is finding it really difficult to get funding, to get hype, to get government contracts.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  I think that's very well put. I don't think actually the majority of Americans are okay with it. And that's why I think this is risky, frankly, for political figures who think that they can ignore these norms and also for the industries that become very closely associated with this sort of culture of impunity. Because actually, I think the vast majority of Americans are very unhappy. The question is, do they believe the problems can be solved? And that what they want is they want government to work for them effectively. The fact that government so often hasn't sort of breeds this kind of cynicism, which gets us back to why there's something somewhat tragic about Doge, because there is actually an appetite for this.

• 20:55Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, a big opportunity.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  A big opportunity and frankly, an opportunity that might be getting wasted right now.

• 21:00Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, without going into who's taking over Doge next.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:05Rebecca Bellan?

  You know, as we look forward, we're going to be coming up to midterm elections and there's going to be another election, I hope. And as Silicon Valley really just like sinks its teeth into Washington, do you see a continuation of this kind of Silicon Valley culture, which is one that's really ruled by like hype and rush to get it done? And it's okay if we kind of break some ethical rules and like, let's find our loopholes where we can, because we need to beat everyone else, especially China right now. Like, do you see a return to decorum anytime soon? Or are we like, are we stuck in this for a little while?

• 21:37Speaker 02

  I think probably a lot of different people have different answers to that. But I will say that it's not looking like move fast and break things is super popular with the general public when it comes to their social security checks or their Medicare. So I don't think ultimately that they can escape electoral consequences for some of the things that are perceived to be not going very well. I actually think it's incumbent, though, on both parties, but because they're the oppositions, particularly the Democrats, to articulate what their alternative is. And this gets back into, you can't reflexively defend the status quo. My work also, particularly, you have to say, well, what sort of guardrail should we have in place

• 22:18Speaker 02

  to ensure that a cadre of wealthy billionaires can't just subsume the economy and the society?

• 22:25Speaker 02

  In the government to serve their own interests or their own kind of narrow idiosyncratic ideological projects. And that a lot of whether either party can articulate that kind of vision for a government that really works for the American people, that's going to determine how much power folks in Silicon Valley have and whether we can return to some of these kind of norms. We're again like public services of public trust. And the economy is important. Leaders of the economy are important, but we don't want them dictating government policy. Because ultimately, the economy is supposed to work for everyday Americans, too.

• 22:58Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, I think that brings us to the end of our time. And I really appreciate you coming on to join us and walk us through this. Where can our listeners connect with you online?

• 23:07Speaker 02

  I always love interacting with people. I'm on X and Blue Sky and Threads. I really also encourage folks who are interested in these issues in the intersection of tech and democracy to go to the Brennan Center's website, www.brennancenter.org. I know it's quaint, but there's a lot of great information there. You can see all of our work and you can sign up for our newsletter, which is a weekly treat that tells you about our work and some of the issues we're tracking.

• 23:34Rebecca Bellan?

  Great. Well, thank you so much for that. And our listeners, you can find me on X and Blue Sky as well. And you can also find Equity at EquityPod on both of those platforms. Talk to you next time.

• 23:46Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.