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elizabeth warren
Warren Leads Charge to Undo $500 Billion Secret Deal Between UAE 'Spy Sheikh' and Trump's Crypto Company
"We cannot allow American national security simply to be sold to the highest bidder."
Feb 06, 2026
The unprecedented money that President Donald Trump is raking in from foreign investors during his second term has prompted Sen. Elizabeth Warren to take the lead in pushing back.
Speaking on the US Senate floor on Thursday, Warren (D-Mass.) called on her fellow senators to support a resolution in favor of condemning and reversing an agreement struck by the Trump administration to sell advanced artificial intelligence technology to the United Arab Emirates.
The resolution was also backed by Sens. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), Andy Kim (D-NJ), and Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.).
Warren's call came days after the Wall Street Journal revealed that a member of the Abu Dhabi royal family secretly backed a massive $500 million investment into the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture just months before the deal for the advanced AI chips was announced.
During her speech, Warren scoffed at the notion that Trump was unaware that lieutenants of Abu Dhabi royal Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan signed a deal in early 2025 to buy a 49% stake in World Liberty Financial, the startup founded by members of the Trump family and the family of Trump Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff.
"President Trump’s own son signed the deal for half a billion dollars," remarked Warren. "An initial payment of $187 million dollars was reportedly directed to flow to Trump family companies. Another initial payment of $31 million dollars was reportedly directed to flow into entities connected to the family of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s golf buddy who had been named the US Special Envoy to the Middle East."
In addition to citing national security concerns about selling sensitive AI technology to the UAE, Warren said that Congress should step in to reverse the deal simply to stop Trump from using the presidency to enrich his personal finances.
"Here we are, one year into Donald Trump’s second term, and Trump has amassed more than $1.5 billion from his crypto ventures like World Liberty Financial," she noted. "Trump is profiting off the Presidency while American families are worrying about their jobs, the rising cost of groceries, and how they're going to pay their bills."
Warren ended her speech by demanding that her fellow lawmakers in Congress act.
"Trump is profiting from decisions that make it easier for countries like China to get their hands on some of our most sensitive and advanced technologies," she said. "Congress needs to grow a spine. We cannot allow American national security simply to be sold to the highest bidder. The Senate must pass this resolution to condemn this corruption and call on Donald Trump to reverse his decision to allow the export of advanced AI chips to the UAE."
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Senators Demand Answers on Equifax Plan to 'Profiteer' Off GOP Medicaid Work Requirements
"Corporate consultants and vendors are getting to make a killing off of Medicaid work requirements' administration machinery while our patients will lose healthcare and suffer," said one advocate.
Feb 05, 2026
Three of the US Senate's top critics of corporate greed and anticompetitive behavior are investigating a scheme by credit report firm Equifax that they say will allow the company to profit from Republican policies that are set to rip away healthcare coverage and food assistance from millions of Americans.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote to Equifax CEO Mark Begor on Tuesday with several questions about the company's anticipated profits from provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that imposed work requirements on recipients of Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Begor told investors last summer that the policy presented a "massive" business opportunity for Equifax, as a product owned by the company called the Work Number is used by many states to instantly verify the wages and work hours of Medicaid applicants.
At least 99 million workers across the country are covered by Equifax's database, which the company has filled with data through exclusive contracts with employers and payroll firms. Equifax has frequently imposed steep price hikes on the product and has been accused of having a monopoly on providing income data to state agencies.
North Carolina's Medicaid program was hit with a 24% price increase in 2022 and a 36% hike in 2024.
"We have very little leverage and recourse to back out," state Medicaid director Jay Ludlam told the New York Times in November.
Luke Farrell, a former employee of the US Digital Service under the Biden administration, told the Times that Equifax owns "a product that has become a core piece of the safety net. I’ve never seen another vendor do such price hikes across public benefits.”
With the new work requirements set to go into effect in January 2027, states will be required to check the database more frequently.
The OBBBA's $1 trillion in cuts to SNAP and Medicaid are projected to cause "over 5 million people to lose their health insurance and over 3 million people to pay higher grocery prices within the next few years," wrote the senators this week.
"But for Equifax, these new threats to Americans’ food assistance and health insurance coverage 'represent the chance to become a lot richer,'" they wrote, quoting the Times' article from November about Equifax's plan to price-gouge states.
The senators continued:
Because Equifax is already dominant in this market, the law’s new red tape requirements allow the company to consolidate power even further, using extractive contracts to price-gouge states, squeeze competitors, and drive up profits. In fact, Equifax is laying the groundwork to cash in by proactively building out a platform called “TotalVerify,” which is specifically marketed as a tool to help “Prepare Your Agency For H.R.1.” Equifax also pitched the platform as a “single-source” for states and government agencies to be able to verify employment, income, incarceration status, consumer address, and phone number history and claims to “help state and government agencies manage the complexities of SNAP and Medicaid programs.” Given that Equifax’s tight grip on this business has “border[ed] on a monopoly,” Equifax stands to gain even more as OBBBA’s red-tape requirements take effect nationwide.
The lawmakers noted that judging from history, the work requirements are unlikely to "be effective at anything but increasing red tape," as the vast majority of Medicaid and SNAP recipients who are eligible to work already do and states have already run "failed" experiments with Medicaid work requirements.
In 2018, Arkansas' program resulted in 18,000 low-income people losing coverage in under a year, with people who had no home internet access and those who qualified for an exemption from the work requirement most likely to lose their benefits.
"Now, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have expanded this policy in a move that will ensure more Americans get tangled up in red tape and lose essential healthcare coverage and food assistance as a result," wrote Warren, Wyden, and Sanders. "That these requirements could allow Equifax to profiteer off of this ‘solution’ [makes] them even more egregious."
Adam Gaffney, former president of Physicians for a National Health Program, summarized the senators' objections to Equifax's price-gouging practices: "Corporate consultants and vendors are getting to make a killing off of Medicaid work requirements' administration machinery while our patients will lose healthcare and suffer. Meanwhile taxpayers will fund the bureaucratic lard."
The senators demanded to know Equifax's per-query costs for each state contract for the Work Number, the number of OBBBA-related contracts it expects to bid for in 2026 and 2027, the company's lobbying expenditures over the past five years for federal, state, and local governments, and whether Equifax plans to retain a clause in its contracts that allows it the “categorical right” to change prices with 30 days’ notice.
"Equifax’s long history of anti-competitive behavior," said the senators, "raises serious concerns about the company’s potential moves to price gouge states and taxpayers."
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Pedal to the Metal on California's Billionaire Tax
I have no problem with hitting billionaires with a much higher tax bill than they now face. The deeper issue is how to prevent the creation of billionaires in the first place.
Jan 28, 2026
A coalition of unions and other progressive groups is trying to get an initiative on California’s ballot this fall which would impose a 5 percent tax on the wealth of the 200-250 billionaires living in the state. The tax would be retroactive, so it applies to billionaires who lived in the state as of January 1 of this year. The supporters estimate that it could raise $100 billion, almost 30 percent of the state’s annual budget, although the tax could be paid over five years.
Many people have asked me what I thought about the tax. I confess to originally being hesitant. I have no problem with hitting billionaires with a much higher tax bill than they now face. After all, they are the ones with the money.
The right likes to push the story that billionaires won’t have incentive to become ridiculously rich if we tax them more. I always found that absurd, but even taken seriously what would it mean? Will Elon Musk spend less money and effort bribing politicians to get government contracts and favorable regulatory treatment if we tax him too much?
But that aside, I do take seriously concerns about evasion and avoidance. Billionaires care a lot about their money, and they are prepared to go to great lengths to avoid having to surrender it to the government. There clearly is some point at which we get less tax revenue by raising rates, as a result of evasion and avoidance. And that point is lower at the state and local level than the national level, since it’s much easier for billionaires to move out of New York City or California than to leave the United States.
On this point, I was influenced by research by Joshua Rauh and Ryan Shyu showing that the state lost 60 percent of the revenue anticipated by California’s 2012 Proposition 30. This raised the marginal tax rate on people earning more than $1 million a year from 10.3 percent to 13.3 percent. This suggested to me that California was very close to this tipping point. (It got closer when Trump’s 2017 tax bill limited the deduction for state and local taxes on the federal taxes.)
Rauh works at the conservative Hoover Institute, so I naturally viewed the work with suspicion, but I could not see anything wrong with it. (If anyone can tell me where they messed up, I’m all ears.)
Anyhow, recognizing that avoidance and evasion are real, I have always been cautious about efforts to whack the rich with very large taxes. I am open to the California wealth tax because its structure seems to minimize this risk.
By making the date at which the wealth tax applies in the past, rich people cannot leave going forward. I was concerned about some billionaires fleeing when the tax was being discussed in the fall, and it seems some did, but at this point that’s water under the bridge.
To be clear, I’m absolutely certain that many of the people facing the tax will do everything they can to try to escape the tax, starting with defeating the initiative, and then tying it up in the courts as long as they can. With the ultimate decision likely to rest with the Republican Supreme Court, I’m not at all confident that the state will see the money, but we can’t preemptively surrender. At this point it seems worth going full speed ahead with the initiative.
The Longer Term: Let’s Not Have Billionaires
My bigger complaint with the effort to tax back some of the billionaires’ billions is that we should be more focused on not letting them be billionaires in the first place. There is an incredibly lazy view that we just have a market sitting there, which generates inequality, and then we need the government to step in to redistribute income.
More than a decade ago, Elizabeth Warren, who I greatly admire, did a viral video that was dubbed “you didn’t build that.” The gist of it was that the success of rich people depended on a social and physical infrastructure that was paid for by the whole of society, not just the hard work and ingenuity of the person who happened to get rich.
This is very true. To be profitable, a factory needs the roads and ports to bring their materials in and ship their finished product out. It also needs a skilled workforce to be both on the factory flaw and to handle business operations. No one can get rich by themselves.
Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Go Far Enough
But this is only part of the story. In addition to the physical and social infrastructure, we have a massive set of rules that determine who gets to keep the goodies. I keep harping on government-granted patent and copyright monopolies, both because there is a huge amount of money at stake (easily over $1 trillion a year or $8k per household) and because they so obviously could be different.
We can make these monopolies shorter and weaker, allowing their holders to profit much less from them. Also, we can rely more on alternative mechanisms, like direct public funding of research, as we do currently with more than $50 billion a year in biomedical research at the National Institutes of Health. Many of today’s yacht-loving billionaires would still be working for a living with different rules on intellectual property.
Labor law is another obvious case where governments set the rules, and they could be structured in a way far more beneficial to workers. In the early post-World War II era it was widely recognized that large corporations with monopolistic power dominated the economy, but that was not necessarily seen as a bad thing, because their workers also benefited from higher wages. This was due to the fact that they were unionized and able to demand their share of the benefits from monopolistic power.
This is much less the case today because unions are far weaker. But that is not a natural outcome, the rules on labor-management relations were written to make workers weaker. There is no natural market in this story, the government writes the rules to make them more beneficial to one side or the other.
Just to give a few examples: the prohibition on secondary boycotts in the US is a regulation that unambiguously weakens unions. A secondary boycott would mean Elon Musk’s suppliers could be struck over sending him steel, if he didn’t give the auto workers at Tesla a big pay hike.
The ban on union shops (“right-to-work”) in most states, where all the workers who benefit from a union pay their share of the union’s costs, is a government intervention against freedom of contract. This also weakens workers. Restrictions or outright bans on collective bargaining by gig workers is another example. In addition, there could be serious penalties for violating labor laws, as in millions of dollars in fines from real courts, rather than joke sanctions from the National Labor Relations Board.
None of this is “the market.” This is a story of government policy designed to give more money to the oligarchs.
The list goes on. Mark Zuckerberg, and now Larry Ellison, would be much poorer without Section 230, which protects their massive social media platforms from the same sort of liability for spreading lies that print and broadcast media face. Different bankruptcy laws that made private equity firms liable for the debts of the companies they take over and then push into bankruptcy would likely have prevented many of today’s billionaires, as would applying a sales tax on financial transactions similar to the sales tax people pay when they buy clothes or shoes.
This is the topic of my now dated book Rigged (it’s free). The point is that the market is infinitely malleable. We can structure it in a way that leads to far more equality or in ways that gives all the money to billionaires, as we have done in the last half century.
In that context, by all means we should try to find creative ways to tax back some of the wealth we have allowed them to accumulate, but it makes much sense, and it’s much more efficient, not to structure the market in a way that gives them all the money in the first place.
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