Big Tech’s Governing Blueprint

The Chamber of Progress, which held a briefing panel this week at the DNC, contrasts with Kamala Harris’s early approach on key issues.

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If you’ve followed our coverage of the DNC this week, you’ll know that I’ve been documenting the difficulties the press faces getting access to events around town where all kinds of corporate outfits are plotting and scheming. However, the Prospect has gotten a glimpse inside a handful of these secret gatherings, one of them being a panel hosted at the Business Forward briefing center by the tech trade group Chamber of Progress. The Chamber is a go-to lobbying and political operations shop in Washington for Big Tech, representing Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook, all of which the Biden administration’s antitrust enforcers have sued for breaking the competition laws.

As with other C-suite wishcasters, namely LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, the Chamber is hoping to turn Vice President Harris in a new, more corporate-friendly direction. Some early signs indicated that having Harris at the top of the ticket instead of Biden could provide an opening there for Big Tech. Harris’s brother-in-law Tony West, who remains a close adviser to her campaign and who spoke at the convention Wednesday night, is the general counsel to Uber, which Chamber of Progress has periodically held as a client.

But the rollout of Harris’s economic platform last week indicated that her administration will not be entirely amenable to a rollback of the Biden-era approach to corporate power. Principally, her platform calls for expanding federal authority to go after price-gouging on groceries and increase antitrust enforcement, among a handful of other populist policies. Tech was conspicuously absent in the policy rollout, however.

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The Chamber of Progress has clearly taken notice of Harris’s stand on corporate malfeasance, and is looking to push back. The panel featured partner Adam Kovacevich and was co-hosted by the New Democrats, a moderate centrist coalition in the House.

The discussion mostly entailed talking points from a policy strategy document, handed out at the event and obtained by the Prospect, titled “Democratic Cost of Living Agenda.” It’s essentially laying out how the lobbying group wants Democrats to bring costs down in the economy, a near-universal goal across the political spectrum. The specific strategy they want Democrats to pursue to accomplish that, however, runs counter to recent policies laid out by the Harris campaign.

For instance, the introductory section of the Chamber’s playbook lists bullet points downplaying the role of concentrated market power in driving up prices during inflation, which is the underlying view motivating Harris’s proposal to ban price-gouging. “Corporate greed is a small factor,” the document reads. “Subsidizing demand pushes prices even higher.”

Another area where the Chamber positions itself well to the right of most mainstream Democrats is on taxes, which will be the main political fight in Congress next year when the Trump tax cuts expire. “Avoid raising taxes with zero- and low-cost solutions,” the Chamber says under its “Key Principles” section. That may be convenient for the Chamber’s clients, but it’s out of step with the stated goals of the Harris campaign. Just this week, her campaign said she would support the Biden White House’s proposal this spring for $5 trillion in tax increases on wealthy Americans earning over $400,000 a year and large companies.

On the whole, the document has several main preoccupations. One is making housing more affordable by changing local zoning laws holding back more housing construction and development. This is fairly consistent with an emerging consensus among Democrats. Harris has proposed both relaxing restrictions on developers and also providing relief to first-time homebuyers, maxing out at a $25,000 subsidy.

Housing policy is the centerpiece of a particular worldview pushed by the Chamber, to the extent that there is a coherent philosophy other than a business wish list. The document mirrors a blueprint released by the Chamber this spring called “The Abundance and Affordability Project.” These policy prescriptions evangelize for a supply-side approach that holds that regulatory constraints on businesses are responsible for the affordability issues that frustrate most Americans. Slashing red tape will lower costs, the Chamber argues, while demand-side subsidies often favored by progressives will only exacerbate the problems.

This view mostly ignores market power by monopolies that constrain productive capacity to drive up prices. In some instances, however, the Chamber recognizes that competition is necessary. To fix exorbitantly high health care costs for Americans, the Chamber actually advocates in this document for “greater funding for antitrust enforcement on hospital systems.” It’s yet to be seen whether the Chamber would actually use its lobbying power to expand funding to the very enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice who are going after their own tech clients.

Under its “competition” section, the Chamber blames protective tariffs for driving up consumer costs. Tariffs are one of the industrial policies favored by the Biden administration across various sectors of the economy to help grow the country’s manufacturing base. Harris hasn’t yet outlined a full plan on tariffs, though she’s been critical of Trump’s proposed across-the-board tariff increases. (At the DNC, Biden’s U.S. trade representative Katherine Tai said that Harris is “a fighter” on trade, who would be expected to continue the worker-centered agenda.)

Trade is just one of the inherent tensions between the abundance agenda and the interests of organized labor, which often favor certain protections on domestic production.

One way to address the affordability crisis identified by the Chamber is to focus on raising wages for workers through higher minimum wages and more unionization. But for example, when it comes to education, the Chamber opts to just “consider small relaxations of child-teacher ratios.” Raising pay to attract talent is wholly absent. In general, the Chamber’s favored tactic is to lift supply-side constraints on labor markets, such as slashing “occupational licensing standards” for various professions, from doctors to airline pilots.

But some of these proposals are just straightforward advocacy for the interests of the Chamber’s clients. There’s a section about embracing innovative technology that pushes Democrats to “encourage vehicle innovation by making rules neutral between human-driven and autonomous vehicles.” Tech companies such as Google and Apple have been at the leading edge of autonomous vehicle experimentation.

The Chamber’s influence-peddling is paradigmatic of the inside game being played at the DNC to swing party leaders toward their clients’ preferred policy planks.

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