The Trump administration is rapidly becoming one of the most consequential investors in the U.S., with roughly $27 billion spread across dozens of equity or quasi-equity deals involving household names like Intel and IBM, as well as lesser-known firms like MP Materials, Trilogy Metals, and Quantinuum.

For these firms, the deals are immensely beneficial. Taking the federal government as a shareholder is like entering a marriage with a partner who is powerful, well resourced, and wants many of the same things that you do. It can be a very good marriage indeed. But it comes with prenup, in the form of a shareholder or operating agreement. And the relationship faces a test on a predictable schedule. We call it an election.

With the next election just weeks away, American business leaders and investors should start to consider what may happen if and when the gavels on Capitol Hill change hands.

House Democrats are already laying the groundwork for investigations, subpoenas, and hearings they plan to pursue against companies and financial firms with ties to the administration if they win the majority in November. It looks like they almost certainly will: A Cornell University model that has correctly predicted the past 14 congressional elections currently puts Democrats' odds at eight in 1o.

That means some of the Trump administration's deals will eventually be reopened, second-guessed, or pulled into congressional hearings because major initiatives of one administration inevitably attract scrutiny when political power changes hands. What one White House built as a partnership, a future administration or congressional majority may examine through a very different lens.

Consider Solyndra. It went bankrupt on a $535 million Energy Department loan guarantee in 2011, opening up a long series of investigations into the company's leadership. Solyndra's problem wasn't that it scored a transactional deal with the Obama administration. It was that the transaction wasn't transparent. The terms and internal warnings only surfaced afterward, through subpoenas.

Today's deals are different. The Trump administration is injecting U.S. capital into private companies at an unprecedented scale, and it is doing so out in the open. Just this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent openly discussed these deals before Congress, defending them as supporting strategic industries that have suffered "market failures."

Transparency is the strongest defense these companies have-but even that isn't a guarantee against lengthy and resource-consuming investigations. Novel programs, like the mix of price floors, loans, and stock options the administration offered MP Materials, may draw excess scrutiny precisely because there is no established playbook for judging them.

I have spent 30 years litigating these sorts of deals. I have found that most companies overlook the fact that they are the most likely target of future investigations simply because they are the easily reachable party. When Congress can't get what it wants directly from the executive branch, the company on the other side of the deal becomes the most attractive source of information.

That shouldn't discourage private-public partnerships. It just means that companies and investors need to understand Washington well enough to be able to assess deals' durability, even under political duress.

Transactional lawyers can negotiate protections on paper. But no indemnity clause eliminates political risk. When the weather turns, the most important questions will be asked not in a courtroom but in the press, where the relationships, credibility, and political judgment a company built before the controversy matter enormously.

The good news is that this risk is manageable. First, get the prenup right. Structure an unwind you can live with under an administration that may view the deal very differently from the one that signed it. Second, build guardrails. Keep governance, control, and information rights clear enough to survive a change in political leadership. Third, build relationships on both sides of the aisle. The people who inherit your deal may not be the people who blessed it. Access that works with only one party is a big bet. Sometimes bets get called.

That last point matters more than most realize. The companies best positioned for a change in power are the ones that have people around the table who can work effectively with both sides of Washington.

In 2027, we will probably see business leaders dragged before the public eye, regardless of whether they have done anything illegal. Rep. Robert Garcia (D., Calif.), who will lead the House Oversight Committee if the House flips, has said his party will go after "anyone that's ripping off the American public from a corporate perspective or CEO perspective." What "ripping off" means here will be very open to interpretation.

None of this is a reason to walk away from Washington's money. Many of the companies that signed deals with the administration smartly entered into partnerships that could prove enormously valuable to strategically important industries.

The lesson here is bigger than any one deal: A Washington win today can become a Washington question tomorrow.

Guest commentaries like this one are written by authors outside the Barron's newsroom. They reflect the perspective and opinions of the authors. Submit feedback and commentary pitches to ideas@barrons.com.

Y. David Scharf is chairman of Morrison Cohen and a veteran litigator and government affairs adviser. He has represented Donald Trump, the Trump Organization, and affiliated entities in legal matters dating back to 2001.