When Uncle Sam Turns Venture Capitalist, What Could Go Wrong?

Alas, Washington isn’t Hollywood, and the government isn’t spending celluloid dollars. In April, Ascend Elements filed for bankruptcy, leaving U.S. taxpayers out nearly $320 million.

Government funding of private companies is receiving new scrutiny as the Trump administration is upping the ante on such efforts by demanding that the feds receive an equity stake for their largesse. While this approach is leading the government into uncharted waters, experts say the operative concept – using taxpayer money to make risky bets on private companies – has a long and troubled history. The bankruptcy of Solyndra, a maker of niche solar panels the Obama administration had given $535 million in 2009, became shorthand for the problems that occur when government tries to pick winners and losers in the marketplace.

“It generally doesn’t work,” said Steven Neil Kaplan, a professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at the University of Chicago’s Booth business school. “There are three problems with it, namely that the government doesn’t usually have the best information; two, it’s going to be political; and three, the incentives aren’t in place to pay for performance.”

It is still too early to assess the Trump administration’s investments in private corporations, but the hundreds of billions of dollars shoveled out the door by the Biden administration through the Investment Infrastructure and Jobs Act provide some insight into the challenges the government faces when it turns into a venture capitalist. RealClearInvestigations’ review of one sliver of that spending – $1.68 billion in grants awarded in 2023 under the umbrella of “Energy, Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Energy Programs, Energy" – demonstrates how difficult it can be to follow the money and assess the impact when taxpayer funds are doled out to private corporations.

Foreign Assets

The grants reviewed by RCI all went to companies involved in the electric vehicle battery market, either in terms of making the batteries themselves or generating the various elements that comprise an EV battery. Unlike the billions doled out by Biden’s EPA through its Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund – which made the regulatory agency a large grant maker for the first time – these Energy Department deals went to existing for-profit companies rather than startups or newly formed nonprofit organizations. RCI’s analysis of the DOE grants did not find any of the glaring political connections it uncovered in the EPA disbursements. 

Ascend Elements marked the biggest taxpayer bet within that package, but there were several others of $100 million or more, according to the Treasury Department’s usaspending.gov. The grants represent venture capital-like moves by the Biden administration to jumpstart and expand renewable energy initiatives in the name of fighting global warming. 

Although taxpayer money is presumably spent in accordance with the government’s enumerated duties and to benefit Americans, some of the large grants went to companies that are enjoying more support abroad than at home. 

For example, Synesqo Specialty Polymers USA, a branch of a Belgian company traded on European exchanges, received $178.2 million. Mike Finelli, Syensqo’s chief technology and innovation officer, highlighted the company’s moves in Europe rather than the U.S. in his response to RCI.

“Syensqo has recently launched a new company in Europe to help scale up commercial demonstration of advanced materials for solid-state batteries in Europe,” he said. “In the U.S., although the policy and cost environment is supportive, market growth is evolving at a measured pace. …  Importantly, the U.S. Department of Energy grant awarded in 2023 remains active, with discussions ongoing, and we continue to serve the market from our existing production in France.”

Similarly, $100 million went to Group 14, a private company in Washington state that is “building the world’s largest factory for advanced silicon battery material.”

The company, which says it has raised roughly $1 billion for the Washington facility it hopes to open this year, acquired an ownership stake in a South Korea factory last year. 

Group 14 did respond to a request for comment. 

Critics of directing government funds to private companies say it can also be difficult to assess the impact of the grants – and how the money was spent – because corporations are not obligated to answer the public’s questions about their businesses. While the taxpayers may have provided a substantial chunk of these companies’ financing, they are responsible to their shareholders, not taxpayers.  

The “Market Test”

Walter Block, an economist on the faculty of Loyola University in New Orleans, said the Energy Department’s 2023 grants also raised related questions about whether taxpayers are bankrolling companies that have not yet passed “the market test.”

“The government shouldn’t be involved in any of that,” said Block, a proponent of the Austrian school of economics, which prioritizes free-market principles. “Taxpayers have a right to ask how and why these things were done if the company isn’t viable in the market.”

Final grades on some of the outstanding grants can be difficult to judge when, as is the case with several of these grants, the recipients are private companies. Synesqo, however, is traded on European markets. When it received a large injection of federal cash in 2023, its stock traded near $95 per share, but its value has since declined by nearly 30%. 

And to Kaplan’s point about who is making the grant decisions, that remains a mystery. Although Energy Secretary Chris Wright has trumpeted the cancellation of various Biden-era deals, the department did not respond to RCI’s multiple requests for comment. Synesqo was the only company to respond to questions.

The hope that the government, with its vast resources, can goose innovation is not new. The U.S. government’s longstanding support for basic research has led to many medical and technological breakthroughs, including radar and the Internet.

Many of those achievements, however, have come through more traditional grants to America’s great research universities, and a separate batch of such grants was also part of Biden’s green energy spending. Governments at all levels have also sought to spur business development and innovation by offering tax incentives, though usually with mixed results.

Venture capital, essentially seed money, is different and unlike more familiar government contracts, such as those for defense contracts or highways and roads. Those arrangements carry their own ethical temptations, ranging from pay-to-play schemes to overt political support, that have made politics infamous, from Tammany Hall to modern-day Chicago or Louisiana. It is those sorts of alleged insider deals that were leveled against the Biden family and now against President Trump and his offspring. 

Necessary Investments

Still, not everyone is opposed to the government making admittedly risky bets. Some consulting companies actually pitch businesses on considering federal sources for venture capital. 

Fred Block, a sociology professor at the University of California, Davis, whose work has been applied to venture capital models, notes that some level of success has been achieved by the Small Business Administration’s Small Business Innovation Research Program.

In addition, a 2006 study by Block and some colleagues on 100 “winners” picked by the trade publication Research & Development showed that at some point in their development, federal money had assisted 88 of them.

“The key point is the necessity of government involvement with cutting-edge projects,” Block told RCI. He noted how private research entities like RCA’s once-fabled Sarnoff Corporation are no longer around. 

“You have to have collaboration between different kinds of specialists and no private company can afford to have all those people on staff,” he said.

Kaplan had also cited the SBA loans as a case where government venture money often bears fruit, but those are much smaller investments and must adhere to strict guidelines. And unlike the Energy Department grants under Biden or some of the moves made by the Trump administration, SBA decisions are made by teams of professionals rather than an anonymous federal apparatus. Again, the issue comes back to the quality of information available and who makes the calls.

“They’ve developed the expertise,” UC Davis’s Block said. “Now that appears to be gone. Who knows who or how decisions are being made now? Maybe Trump makes them in the middle of the night.”

Big Money for Recipients

While none of the individual deals stand out in terms of the federal government’s enormous spending, they often represent big money for individual recipients: The $82 million that went to Cirba Solutions, a battery recycling outfit in Charlotte, N.C., for instance, amounted to nearly twice the company’s estimated annual revenue of $39.5 million.

That sort of proportion also shows how these Department of Energy grants are different from similar big economic moves Washington has made, such as propping up the savings and loan and auto industries, or trying to keep markets solvent. 

Critics of both the gigantic spending on green energy specifically, and the effort to wrench the American economy away from the fossil fuels that power most of it, warned that more Solyndras are possible.

“What’s the point of Congress authorizing billions of spending with almost no oversight?” asked Daniel Turner, the executive director of Power The Future, a conservative group concentrating on rural power. “Of course we should be concerned about what might happen. It’s absurd to have funneled so much money to green technology companies without market approval.”

Yet even in proven markets, the risks inherent in the government taking huge stakes in companies are problematic.

“When there’s so much money involved, are there conditions?” asked Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, which does not accept government donations. “There’s something very pernicious, very suspect about the idea of the government being venture capitalists, and there’s so much more at stake when it’s taxpayer dollars involved.”

There is also the possibility that a company backed by federal money makes it big, in which case new questions arise about equity, how the government may define success as venture capitalists, and whether the government may try to become an active investor, looking to influence personnel and other decisions at the company. Those factors are on top of the hoary conflicts of interest that have long bedeviled government moves.

Those questions are likely to multiply in the coming years as both parties seem more open to the government owning stock in private companies. The Trump administration has already received billions of dollars in equity stakes for money funneled to private companies (mostly tied to national security), and Sen. Bernie Sanders has introduced legislation that could give the U.S. a 50% ownership of the largest AI companies. Neither the Trump administration nor Sanders’ office responded to requests for comment.

Kaplan outlined some steps the government could take to improve the process, such as only backing companies that have already passed “the market test” or shown an ability to raise significant capital. Even then, however, the same terms should attach to a government grant that do to the private investments, and thus the entire practice is problematic and best avoided, he said.

“It’s just rife with conflict and bad information,” Kaplan told RCI. “For a private investor, if you’re negative, you go out of business. But if it’s the government and it goes negative, they raise your taxes.”