Silicon Valley braces for firestorm of Dem scrutiny in 2027

Silicon Valley is bracing for a firestorm of scrutiny should Democrats take control of Congress next year, underscoring how the industry’s efforts to get on President Trump’s good side last year became a political liability.

After two years of a GOP-controlled House and Senate, Democratic lawmakers are expected to bring the heat on tech firms, both through investigations into the companies’ relationships with the Trump administration and proposed AI safety regulations.

In the face of a Republican-led Washington, multiple AI and defense tech firms lined up to reconcile with the Trump administration at the start of the president’s second term.

Two years later, political strategists predict these efforts — and a lack of AI safety regulations — could come back to haunt the tech industry in a Democrat-led Congress.

The tech industry has “done nothing to prevent themselves from being the villain of the 2028 storyline,” Cooper Teboe, a Silicon Valley-based Democratic strategist, told The Hill. “I suspect they have a significant number of investigations coming their way on the official side and on the political side.”

Should Democrats take the majority, Teboe predicted party members will start “pissed and looking for someone to go after.”

While business executives cozying up to incoming presidents of both parties is nothing new, the shift of the typical left-leaning Silicon Valley seems to be making a lasting impression on Americans’ perception of these companies.

In a recent Politico poll, Americans were more likely to assume the executives heading up the largest tech firms are Republican, including ones like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who clashed with the Trump administration on AI safety earlier this year.

Asked about the poll, Teboe said, “How could they not? Like, these guys are standing behind the president every chance they get.”

“They’ve made no effort to be a bipartisan force prior to the last month when they realized how f—ed they were,” he added.

After being hammered by Trump in his first term, several social media, AI and defense tech firms gave inaugural donations, took trips to Mar-a-Lago and changed their own policies ahead of his return to the White House last year.

The executives’ rekindled relationships with Trump were on full display during the inauguration, where leaders like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Google’s Sundar Pichai sat behind the president.

Democrats are already showing an appetite for increased pressure on the tech companies or the CEOs who run them as concerns around data centers and AI safety tank voters’ sentiment on the technology.

Earlier this month, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.) and Chris Van Hollen (Md.) released a 27-page report of a nearly yearlong probe into how the data centers powering AI could raise costs for consumers.

Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. (D-N.J.), the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s ranking member who could soon become committee chair if Democrats take the majority, announced last week he expanded his investigation into surveillance pricing powered by AI and other tech.

“I suspect that as Democrats look to reshape the party, which we sorely need to do, a very significant part of that is going to be around AI,” Teboe continued.

The Washington, D.C.-based firm Morgan Lewis said in a blog post last week that the next Congress will “not necessarily start from scratch,” suggesting, “Existing inquiries, prior document requests and responses from businesses could provide a roadmap for future oversight.”

“What we’ve seen is that Democrats on almost every committee have a deep interest in tech issues and have been sending out requests and questions about them or trying to have hearings and trying to learn more about them,” Susanne Sachsman Grooms, a partner at Cooley LLP and head of the firm’s bipartisan congressional investigations practice, told The Hill.

Several committees could take up issues around tech companies and their relationship with the Trump administration. The House Oversight and Government Accountability Committee has already vowed to go after the Trump family’s crypto ventures.

According to a Washington Post report , major donors to Trump’s White House ballroom project included tech figures like Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer; Fred Humphries, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of U.S. government affairs; and Horacio Rozanski, Booz Allen Hamilton’s CEO. These figures could be some of the first exposed in Democrats’ oversight investigations.

“It’s really difficult right now for Republicans to distance themselves from the industry interests within the [Trump] administration and within the Republican party writ large,” said Sacha Haworth, the executive director of tech watchdog and safety advocacy group Tech Oversight Project .

While business relations with Trump could be a motivating factor for Democrats, Grooms and other congressional investigations experts suggested concerns around AI safety and regulations are likely the ultimate force for both Democrats and Republicans.

“There’s a growing … bipartisan consensus on the Hill about concerns related to AI and to data centers and to the use and growth and proliferation of AI and Big Tech,” said Brandon Rios, the co-lead of the congressional investigations team at the law firm DLA Piper.

“From Republicans and Democrats on the Hill, [we’re going to see] some odd bedfellows here and there,” Rios added.

For both parties, Rios said “it’s never good politics to have high utility prices or a lack of water in an area,” referring to concerns that data centers could be raising utility bills or straining communities’ water supplies.

The pressure could also come in the form of AI safety legislation passing Congress if Democrats take control of both chambers.

“Democrats are in a much better position to pass legislation on AI safety and guardrails on the tech industry generally, because we’re not beholden to the president,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.), a member of the Oversight Committee, told The Hill.

Even if Democrats get bills to Trump’s desk, he will have the option to veto them.

“At the very least, that’ll be a good message going into 2028,” Subramanyam said. “There is also value in putting popular legislation on his desk and daring him to veto it.”