Day: September 6, 2025

• Trump’s Intel deal involves the US government investing in Intel.
• Though controversial among Republicans, it’s earning him some approval from progressives.
• That’s because it’s similar to an idea pitched by Bernie Sanders years ago.

President Donald Trump’s Intel deal is earning him some measure of approval from an unexpected corner: progressives.

After Trump announced a plan for the US government to take a roughly 9.9% stake in the iconic US tech company, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont offered cautious praise for the move. Other progressives say they have little problem with the investment itself, but would like to see other policies accompany it.

It’s the latest indication of how the deal, which marks a substantial break from longstanding GOP orthodoxy around free market capitalism, is cutting across political lines in strange ways.

While the president’s most loyal supporters have cheered the deal, many in the GOP have made their discomfort clear, arguing that it will distort markets and harm American capitalism in the long run.

“I think it’s a big mistake to have government ownership of things,” Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said on CNBC this week. “And of course it’s a step toward socialism.”

In a statement for this story, White House spokesman Kush Desai said the administration was pursuing free-market policies and “rectifying the America Last policies that haven’t worked” simultaneously.

“Washington, DC’s blind commitment to consensus orthodoxy that ignored the realities of the world is exactly why Americans and America were left behind,” Desai said. “Look no further than lopsided ‘free’ trade arrangements that let foreign cheating decimate our industrial base.”

‘That’s not the role for the United States government’

Under the deal, the US government is investing $8.9 billion in Intel stock, funded primarily by grants that the company would have received under the CHIPS and Science Act, a 2022 law signed by President Joe Biden aimed at spurring semiconductor manufacturing.

It will make the US government the largest single investor in the company.

The deal came seemingly out of nowhere. Days earlier, Trump said Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan should resign, calling him “conflicted” over his connections to Chinese companies. Then led to a White House meeting between Tan and Trump, which resulted in the deal.

Trump and one of his top economic advisors have indicated that this could be the first of many such deals. “I’m sure that at some point there’ll be more transactions, if not in this industry then other industries,” Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council, said in August.

The plan bears some resemblance to a years-old proposal from Sanders and Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

The duo offered an amendment to the CHIPS Act that would have required companies receiving funding via the bill to issue warrants or equity stakes to the US government.

That amendment also had other conditions, including a ban on stock buybacks and required the company to remain neutral in union organizing efforts. It was ultimately not included in the final bill.

“I am glad the Trump administration is in agreement with the amendment I offered three years ago to the CHIPS Act,” Sanders said in a statement. “If microchip companies make a profit from the generous grants they receive from the federal government, the taxpayers of America have a right to a reasonable return on that investment.”

Sanders added that the Trump administration “should also make sure that these companies will not engage in illegal union busting, outsource American jobs overseas or buy back their own stock.”

Warren, on the other hand, has been less willing to praise Trump’s move. This week, she sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick excoriating the administration for not attaching more conditions to the money — and for dropping conditions that initially came with the CHIPS Act funding.

“He waived all of the requirements that would make the taxpayer investment in that company work for the American people, and effectively just became one more profit-maximizing investor,” Warren told BI on Thursday, referring to Trump. “That’s not the role for the United States government.”

Other progressives have said they had little problem with the government taking a stake in a private company, but viewed Trump’s move as incomplete.

“I have no problem with the American taxpayers being reluctant shareholders in Intel,” Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, though he said the company needed billions more in investment and that the government should use the agreement to push the company to sign a labor neutrality agreement.

Democratic Rep. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin said that Trump needed a broader industrial policy, versus ad-hoc agreements with individual companies.

“You can’t just do ideas here, and ideas there, and expect it to work,” Pocan told BI. “Even if there’s something good to an idea, without the other components, it doesn’t have the effectiveness.”

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• Will Oakley is an independent consultant who lives in London.
• He started his career at Accenture and then decided he wanted to operate independently.
• This career choice has allowed Oakley to have flexibility in how he works, he told Business Insider.

Will Oakley, 35, lives in London and works as an independent consultant. He works, in part, with the Barton Partnership, which helps him bring in other consultants as needed to assist in his work with clients. The following has been edited for brevity and clarity.

I started out my career at Accenture, so I went through the graduate machine there, did my training, my time in the trenches, and enjoyed that experience. Accenture is a huge consulting company, and it’s a great place to cut your teeth. But with all of those large, tier-one and tier-two consulting firms, they come with a certain culture and a certain way of working.

There’s always been a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit in me. When I started and looked at the next 10 years, I thought, did I want to climb that corporate ladder, or take some risks and try to build my own portfolio of clients?

I’ve been independent since 2014. A lot of people say I’m kind of an independent consulting thoroughbred, in the sense that I haven’t really ever had too much of a long, permanent career.

The last decade has been spent going from client to client. I’ve been lucky enough to have client relationships that have lasted four or five years and never really had to have a break between those contracts. I’ve just kind of rolled from one to the next, and companies like Barton have helped me do that in the last few years and given me some further pipeline and opportunities.

Network-based consulting

Other parts have come from my own prospecting, my own network, and some recommendations. Today, I’m not just an independent consultant. We’re starting to pull together a new model and way of working, where it’s network-based consulting. We’re starting to form together into teams of consultants who can do projects and programs for clients at much larger scales.

Clients, we found, are looking for an alternative to those traditional players who usually come with extremely high costs. Clients come to us and say, “Hey, can you do that next step in the chain of what the firm was about to do?” So, we’ve kind of followed in the wake of these huge container ships and made a pretty good living off the back of that.

When it was just me, there was sort of a predefined expectation with the client of what they were shopping for. It might be, “I need a project manager, and I’ve got a series of deliverables already done; I just want you to come in and do so.”

Now, it’s kind of changed the narrative. I can bring other people into the conversation to not just execute, but maybe help you look forward to recommending what you should be thinking about.

‘A meritocracy kind of guy’

The thing that attracts people to this approach is the flexibility. If you decide to take some time out, you’re your own boss. We’re often working with remote and global clients, so there’s an element of being able to locate yourself around the world and move between different clients.

While our day rates are lower than traditional consultants’, people often take home more than they might have with a permanent career at a big firm.

One downside is trying to find a way to mitigate knowledge loss. I wouldn’t quite call it IP, but the content that you bring from one client to the next. Often, when you’re engaging with clients, what you’re building is for them, and it’s their IP. That’s what they’re paying you for. In the background, there are loads of playbooks and frameworks, and materials that you can store for yourself. But how do you galvanize five, 10, 15, 20 other independent consultants to rally around the same service offering or solution?

I am a meritocracy kind of guy. I like to deliver good work and be judged on the results of that work. For those at more traditional consulting firms, it can be a pretty brutal political game. Some people love that, but a lot of the advice I got right at the start of my career was that the people who make it to the top are the people who take the most shit for the longest period. I thought, “Is that the life I want?”

The best advice I give other independent consultants is, whatever level of experience you’re at or whatever role you’re playing, invest in yourself so that you can be indispensable.

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com.