For two years, congressional Democrats furious over corporate America’s cooperation with the Trump administration have been limited to the sternly worded letter.

After the midterm elections, some of them will likely have subpoena power. Companies in their sights are armoring up accordingly.

Tech and defense leaders like Palantir Technologies Inc., Apple Inc., and Microsoft Corp. are hiring Democratic Party insiders including former Senator Mark Begich and mega-lobbyist Steve Elmendorf. Other companies that scored contracts helping to facilitate mass immigration raids or sought favor by bankrolling presidential pet projects are scouring internal documents in advance of a push of subpoenas. CEOs are bracing for an uncomfortable inevitability: public testimony before hostile questioners about how they cooperated with a domineering president’s demands, and why.

Insiders across K Street describe the flurry of preparations as unprecedented, driven by an acknowledgment of the unusually transactional nature of President Donald Trump’s second term — and outrage from Democrats toward those they see as complicit.

While changing political winds always prompt new hires and strategic shifts, prospective Democratic committee chairs are signaling an unsparing blitz that will look to channel voters’ anger over alleged corruption and the direction of the economy. With polls indicating Democrats are clear favorites to take back at least one chamber of Congress, corporations are treating the looming confrontation as a crisis — and spending like it’s an emergency.

New lobbying registrations have exploded this fall as companies sign up representatives with ties to the Democrats likely to investigate their dealings with Trump, and with experience preparing corporations and CEOs for congressional oversight hearings. Take some of the companies that donated to the White House ballroom project.

Apple, which hired the Trump-connected lobbyist Jeff Miller during the presidential campaign in 2024, last month tapped Arshi Siddiqui, a onetime aide to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, to join its roster of lobbyists, advising on “tax, trade and technology-related issues.”The company has also hired Liz Allen, a former senior official in President Joe Biden’s State Department who served as Tim Walz’s chief of staff during his 2024 vice presidential bid.

Microsoft, another ballroom donor, in August reported contracting with Rivendell Group, adding a pair of former Democratic aides to its stable of outside representatives.

And Palantir, which has seen a major expansion in federal contracts over the past two years, has added bipartisan firms to its slate of outside lobbyists. In late spring, the defense contractor hired a team led by Elmendorf, a longtime senior adviser to House Democrats who worked on John Kerry’s presidential campaign, and Begich, a former Democratic senator from Alaska.

The Washington Post reported this week on a spreadsheet that tracked $333 million in donations for the ballroom from private donors, including some companies whose contributions hadn’t previously been disclosed. Donors included Salesforce Inc., which made a pair of $1 million donations, the Post reported, as well as Marc Benioff, the company’s chief executive. Benioff has cultivated a close relationship with Trump as the company has increased its business with the US government.

The software company has also bolstered its lobbying, records show, this summerg up longtime Democratic lobbyist Mary Beth Stanton, as well as Checkmate Government Relations, a firm with close ties to Trump’s inner circle.

Anxiety isn’t limited to firms that donated to the ballroom project. One Republican lobbyist said that companies that helped fund Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy’s “Great American Road Trip” this summer — a group that included many with interests before the department — have expressed concern that they could be called before Congress to explain their interactions with the administration.

Companies that contributed to Trump’s inaugural fund, his MAGA Inc. political action committee and various events tied to the country’s 250th anniversary, which Trump largely molded into a celebration of himself and his administration, are also worried, this person said.

Potential targets of Democratic scrutiny are generally reluctant to talk publicly, but are bracing for lawmakers to probe anything that smacks of graft.

A prominent financial executive described months of repositioning, including rebalancing political contributions in an attempt to curry favor with the party expected to take power.

A corporate consultant said clients are frantic to avoid being called to explain their cooperation with politically unpopular policies. A K Street lawyer said firms are advising executives to get honest answers ready about their interactions with Trump and his administration’s officials — and to comb through internal emails to see what insiders really said about how they were reconciling the president’s demands.

The lobbying giant Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck warned in a client alert this month that companies should be preparing now for aggressive oversight, including hearings at which chief executives will be questioned in order to score “political points.”“The practical consequences can be substantial, including reputational harm, stock market impact, executive testimony, extensive document production obligations, parallel regulatory inquiries and legislative initiatives targeting a company’s business practices,” the memo said.

Democratic strategists say lawmakers can expect heavy pressure from supporters to investigate companies and CEOs with financial ties to Trump and his administration. Lindsay Owens, president of the progressive economic think tank Groundwork Collaborative, says voters across party lines increasingly believe America’s political and economic systems are rigged in favor of powerful interests.

“That’s now the diagnosis that the American people share — broadly, firmly and coherently,” Owens said.

In recent weeks, Owens and her team have been meeting with congressional staff to share a dossier of potential targets for investigation. It includes Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, the behemoths run by Trump ally Elon Musk, as well as Palantir, OpenAI, Amazon.com Inc. and Apple. There’s particular interest in companies in the technology industry that benefited from a permissive regulatory posture or tariff carve-outs after contributing sizable donations to the president’s inaugural committee or White House projects.

The Groundwork list also names companies outside the tech realm, including McDonald’s Corp., Walmart Inc. and Intuit, the parent company of TurboTax. Live Nation Entertainment Inc., which saw an antitrust case with the Justice Department settled after Trump’s personal intervention, according to the Wall Street Journal, was also singled out.

Corporate concern has been growing all year, in lockstep with Democrats’ increasingly rosy outlook for taking the House, and possibly the Senate, too.

“What may happen if the House does flip is that there will be a lot of hearings, there will be a lot of subpoenas, a lot of tension between the legislative branch and the executive branch over executive privilege and so on,” said Peter Orszag, the chief executive of the investment bank Lazard Inc. and the former budget director in the Obama administration, on an earnings call in January.

“It starts with staff asking questions, then a letter, then a request for documents,” said Syd Terry, a lobbyist at BGR Group. Terry previously worked for Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois when she chaired a consumer protection subcommittee. “By the time anything reaches the hearing room, the story is mostly set. That’s what we’re telling clients through BGR’s oversight working group: The time to prepare is now, not after the first letter arrives.”

Veterans of Capitol Hill see plenty of investigative opportunity for Democrats: “There’s a lot of red meat there,” said the retired Congressman Henry Waxman of California, a crusading liberal Democrat who led investigations and chaired the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform during George W. Bush’s administration.

With polls showing rising concern about government corruption, Congress has a duty to investigate, he says. A September Gallup poll found that 89% of US adults say government corruption is “widespread,” including large majorities of both Republicans and Democrats.

“It’s been eye-opening for the public to see what’s been going on under the Trump administration,” says Waxman.

Firms that have benefited from the Trump administration’s light touch on antitrust enforcement could also be in for particular scrutiny, said Seth Bloom, a lawyer who has represented leading companies and was the longtime general counsel of the Senate’s antitrust subcommittee.

Representative Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, is poised to take over the Judiciary Committee that oversees antitrust issues in the House and recently spoke on the issue at a conference.

“Congressional Republicans have acted like toadies and sycophants, mindlessly rubber-stamping the president’s bad deals instead of engaging in meaningful oversight,” Raskin said. “They say nothing while shady deals cause prices to go up, wages to go down, and economic disparities to widen.”The recent merger of Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery to create Skydance — and particularly whether the administration’s approval hinged on promises about favorable media coverage from impacted networks like CBS News and CNN — could earn particular scrutiny.

“I would expect a lot more oversight,” Bloom said. “What happened with these mergers?”Waxman says Democrats will also “absolutely” want to examine the expansive role Musk has played in the Trump administration as head of the Department of Government Efficiency, calling the tech CEO “an easy oversight target.”But getting answers may be harder than posing the questions. Waxman believes conducting effective oversight will be more difficult than it was during his heyday in the 1990s and 2000s. Congressional staff has been cut in recent years, he notes, leaving committees with fewer investigators to conduct complex inquiries. He also expects the Trump White House to resist investigations.

“It’s a hostile administration,” says Waxman. “It’s much worse today than when I was chairman. I think the executive branch will just shut down any cooperation in giving Congress information. But that only makes the task more vital.”