The 181-Page List: Democrats Are Deciding Which CEOs to Put Under Oath

There is a document moving through Democratic Washington this week, and how the party handles it will say more about the next two years than any victory speech did.

It runs 181 pages. It was drafted by the Groundwork Collaborative, a progressive economic think tank, with the effort spearheaded by former staffers for Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, and it identifies hundreds of executives and companies for congressional investigation once Democrats take their new majorities in January. The Washington Sun's Jeff Stein, who first reported the dossier, describes its ambitions in the document's own framing: ["resignations of major CEOs, hauling people in, [and] material restitution"](https://www.washingtonsun.com/congress/democrats-oversight-judiciary-corporate-investigations) for consumers.

The target list reads like a map of every place Americans feel squeezed. The largest tech companies. Artificial intelligence labs. Natural gas firms. Private prisons. Nursing home operators. Online sports gambling platforms — with a proposed hearing on how their products use AI to encourage compulsive gambling. Landlords, hauled under oath about rental junk fees. Credit card companies, probed on whether they help retailers charge bigger spenders higher prices. Grocery chains, forced to disclose what they do with the consumer data they harvest at the register. The through-line is deliberate: not corporate misbehavior in the abstract, but the specific corporate mechanics of why everything costs so much.

That framing is the strategy. "We need to be laser-focused on the pain points and the corporations people blame for jacking up their prices," Groundwork's Alex Jacquez told the Sun. Lindsay Owens, who leads the group, pressed the same case: "The American people are clear that corporate greed is behind rising prices, and they want to see it held to account." In their telling, Democrats won an affordability election, and the dossier is what doing something about affordability looks like when you hold gavels but not the White House.

Who's actually reading it

This is not a fringe wish list gathering dust. According to the Sun, the document has been examined by House Democrats on the Judiciary and Oversight committees, by Warren herself, by House Democratic caucus leadership, by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and by roughly half a dozen chiefs of staff for incoming senators. The gavels it contemplates are real and nearly assigned: Sanders is expected to lead the Senate health and labor committee, Warren the Banking Committee, Sheldon Whitehouse the Judiciary Committee, Ron Wyden the Finance Committee. In the House, the incoming Oversight chair, Robert Garcia, greeted the election results with a two-word statement of intent: "Lawyer up."

The progressive caucus chair, Greg Casar, has already picked his opening target, telling The Lever that subpoenaing AI executives should be Democrats' "first priority" in the new year — a choice that looks less like ideology and more like listening, given that voters in ten states just rejected data centers in 40 of 41 ballot measures on the same night they handed Democrats Congress.

The resistance inside the party

And yet the most senior Democrat with the most relevant gavel is conspicuously not buying in. Jamie Raskin, the incoming House Judiciary chair, told the Sun flatly: "We're not targeting particular corporations." Pressed by Semafor, he went further, saying Democrats would not pursue people or corporations "in a vendetta-like fashion," adding: "That's Donald Trump land." A Democratic aide waved the whole thing off to Semafor with the practiced boredom of a town where everyone has a plan: "We all get a lot of emails."

The centrist wing's objection is sharper than etiquette. Ben Ritz of the Progressive Policy Institute warned that the message "can't be a message of, 'Corporate America is the source of all your problems.'" Jim Kessler of Third Way compressed the counter-strategy into a telegram: "Big targets. Fewer targets. Go deep. Don't shoot with buckshot. This needs to be understandable to people." Some in the party would rather aim the oversight machinery almost entirely at the administration's own scandals and leave corporate America for the campaign ads.

Both sides of this argument are drawing on real history, which is what makes it interesting. The skeptics remember how quickly aggressive hearings can curdle into spectacle, and how spectacle reads to the suburban voters who just delivered the majority. Groundwork's answer, via Owens, is that the spectacle-aversion theory has been tested and found wanting — that the scandal-focused investigations of the first Trump term made for great television and poor politics, while the thing voters keep screaming about, in this election through every exit poll available, is the cost of living. "Corporate influence in Washington is what voters are referring to when they say Washington is corrupt," Owens told The Lever. On that reading, a landlord executive explaining junk fees under oath is not a distraction from the affordability agenda. It is the affordability agenda, in the only branch of government Democrats now control.

What to watch in January

Strip away the think-tank branding and the question the dossier forces is simple: did Democrats win a mandate to investigate Donald Trump, or a mandate to investigate the price of groceries? The honest answer is probably that voters didn't parse it, and the party will have to choose anyway. Subpoena calendars are finite. Hearing rooms book one witness table at a time.

Here is the tell to watch for. When the new committees gavel in this January, look at the first witness called. If it is a former administration official, the vendetta caucus won. If it is a landlord, a gambling executive, or an AI lab's chief executive raising a right hand — the 181 pages found their reader.