The liberal-flavored Chamber of Progress is pressing Democrats to scrutinize the White House — but avoid probing tech giants that bankrolled and benefited from Trump’s presidency.
Freddy Brewster
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Two years ago, California was on the brink of passing some of the strongest artificial intelligence regulations in the country — until the Chamber of Progress stepped in.
Launched in 2021, the Democratic-focused tech-industry trade group insists it is “not just another business group” like the corporate lobbying giant Chamber of Commerce. Instead, the Chamber of Progress positions itself as a liberal watchdog organization, saying it’s “a tech industry coalition devoted to a progressive society, economy, workforce, and consumer climate.”
But a letter to California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) about the AI bill that the Chamber of Progress signed and helped lay the groundwork for didn’t mention any of these matters. Instead, the missive claimed the legislation, which would have required a “kill switch” for rogue AI agents threatening workers, consumers, the economy, or humanity, was “a needless step backward for the California innovation economy.”
A month later, Newsom vetoed the legislation, saying the bill risked “curtailing the very innovation that fuels advancement in favor of the public good.”
It’s not the only time the Chamber of Progress has mounted efforts that appear to run counter to its stated goals. In the past two years, the lobbying group, which is bankrolled by Silicon Valley companies and a rightwing venture capital firm that have spent millions backing MAGA world, has opposed at least 24 bills throughout the country that sought to regulate surveillance pricing, children’s access to social media, new-age payday lending technologies, and other apparent risks to “a progressive society.”
“I typically run into them on the opposite end of pro-worker, pro-consumer, and antitrust policy in California and in state legislatures across the country,” said Lee Hepner, legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.
Now, the tech front group has a more ambitious target: the Democratic Party and the oversight powers it will wield if it successfully reclaims control of Congress. As Silicon Valley is reportedly “bracing for a firestorm of scrutiny” if Democrats win majorities in Congress, the Chamber is challenging the Party’s plans to use one of its most powerful tools for holding Big Tech accountable: congressional investigations.
A year ago, the Chamber launched the Blue Horizon Project, an initiative to “restore tech optimism in the Democratic Party and reset the relationship between Democrats and the technology sector.” Then, last month, the project published a blog post urging Democrats to focus their firepower on President Donald Trump, rather than the tech companies that have showered him and his pet projects with cash donations.
Adam Kovacevich, Chamber of Progress’ CEO, doesn’t deny that one of the group’s main focuses is to have Democrats aim their scrutiny at the Trump administration — and leave business out of it. Kovacevich, Google’s former top federal policy strategist, said that if Democrats probe Big Tech’s ties to Trump, it could alienate voters and drive away big business, like the Party has done in the past.
“I hope they aim oversight at the Trump administration and not business, because I think that would be a huge mistake of repeating a Biden-era war on business, which, in my view, set Democrats back,” Kovacevich told The Lever.
Others disagree and worry corporate groups like Chamber of Progress risk distracting Democrats from holding accountable the companies funding and benefiting from Trump’s presidency.
“Voters want a vision for the future. Corporations, especially Big Tech, are rigging the economy for themselves in collaboration with Trump,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, a nonprofit that scrutinizes corporate and billionaire influence in politics. “Democrats, by investigating how corporate America and Trump rigged the economy for the rich generally and the Trump family specifically, can reveal what has happened and commit themselves to doing the opposite.”
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The Man In Charge
From 2007 to 2019, Kovacevich worked for Google’s Washington, D.C. lobbying arm, during which he helped stave off a 2012 Federal Trade Commission investigation into Google’s alleged anticompetitive tactics. By 2010, Kovacevich was leading the tech giant’s lobbying arm and grew it from an $800,000 operation in 2006 to a $21.7 million, 100-lobbyist powerhouse in 2018.
The following year, Kovacevich was fired from Google amid an “overhaul” of the tech company’s government affairs operation. Two years later, he started the Chamber of Progress.
“The tech industry’s political honeymoon is over, and everyone wants to make sure that tech operates fairly towards communities,” Kovacevich said in an announcement about the Chamber’s start. “We’ll support sensible rules that nurture the things that people love about technology, while curbing tech’s downsides.”
While the Chamber’s mission sounds like it would be in line with many Democratic politicians and voters, Kovacevich’s history suggests otherwise.
As a Harvard undergraduate student, he led an effort in 1997 to pressure the university to purchase grapes from non-unionized grape pickers — essentially begging Harvard to cross a picket line. Kovacevich’s family owned a non-union vineyard in Bakersfield, California at the time.
Also while at Harvard, Kovacevich became close friends with Tom Cotton, who would later become a U.S. senator for Arkansas and who penned an op-ed urging Trump to send National Guard troops to “restore order to our streets” during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
Kovacevich has donated to election efforts for Cotton and far-right Ohio Republican Rep. Jim Jordan, among other Republicans. His bio on the Chamber’s website touts his prior work for moderate Democrats such as former Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, who later served as the chairman for No Labels, a centrist organization that in 2023 promised to put a Republican and a Democrat on the presidential ballot.
In the past, Kovacevich has urged Democratic presidential candidates to nominate more people with “business experience,” claiming that this is what the Party’s base wants. He’s also attacked the progressive news outlet The American Prospect,the watchdog organization Revolving Door Project, and the consumer advocacy groups Public Citizen, claiming that they “worked to blackball Biden [nominees] and appointees with corporate experience.”
Kovacevich told The Lever that he believes that the Democratic Party should be a “big, loud tent,” that includes progressives and business figures alike — including Big Tech.
“I’m not in favor of shrinking the tent,” he said. “There are some who think that the tech industry should be kicked out of the Democratic Party tent. We tried that in the Biden era, and it was a lose-lose [situation] because not only did the Biden-era anti-tech policy drive out a lot of tech people from the Party, but it utterly failed to attract new working class voter support.”
Co-opting Progressive Language
Under Kovacevich, the Chamber of Progress has regularly used progressive-coded language to urge Democrats to oppose consumer protections that could impact Silicon Valley.
In 2024, California passed a bill making it illegal for social media companies to “provide an addictive feed to a user, unless the operator does not have actual knowledge that the user is a minor.”
The Chamber opposed the bill, claiming that “parents are not always best suited to control how their child uses a platform” and that the bill would disproportionately harm LGBTQ youth.
The Chamber opposed a similar 2025 Arkansas bill that would have set social media limits for children 12 years old and younger. The legislation was aimed at combating social media that results in “compulsive usage” that can cause “psychological distress, loss of control, anxiety, or depression.”
The Chamber, however, wrote to lawmakers that the bill would “disproportionately harm historically marginalized youth,” claiming that these children “have the most to gain from social media engagement, particularly if they face adversity or isolation offline.”
“[The bill] risks restricting content for LGBTQ+ youth who use online platforms to seek emotional support, search for information about their identities, and find communities that accept them when their own parents do not,” the Chamber wrote to Arkansas lawmakers.
The Arkansas bill was pulled by its Democratic authors.
“What this reveals is that the Chamber of Progress and other big tech-aligned groups are willing to employ any issue or constituency that helps favor its rhetoric,” Jane Chung, a former Facebook employee and consumer advocate against Big Tech, told The Lever. “Their co-opting of progressive language and issues is hypocritical at best, and deeply cynical at worst.”
The Chamber has opposed at least eight other bills aimed at limiting minors’ access to social media. The group has also opposed at least 10 bills aimed at cracking down on surveillance pricing and junk fees.
Earlier this year, the Chamber opposed a California bill that would ban surveillance pricing, stating in a letter to lawmakers that a ban on the technology would “jeopardize the personalized discounts… that help California families stretch their budgets.”
Kovacevich concurred, saying it was a bad bill that could be detrimental to the average consumer.
“That bill would have raised prices for consumers,” he said. “I think that the anti-corporate, populist left doesn’t have a lock on the Democratic Party, and they don’t represent the whole Party on these topics. A central pillar of our work is that Democrats are a big-tent party, and that we believe that most Democratic voters are tech pragmatists.”
That bill, called AB 2564, would have allowed certain discounts, but banned “a customized price for a good for a specific consumer or group of consumers, based, in whole or in part, on personally identifiable information.”
The bill passed both houses, but was never enacted because of an obscure legislative procedure
“What you often see is an entity like the Chamber of Progress working behind the scenes, and often through whatever levers of power they can access to exert leverage very quietly through the amendment process,” Hepner said. “This is why you see so many bills stripped of any mechanism for enforcement or riddled with exemptions that kind of leave a husk of what the bill was initially designed to do.”
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“Don’t Hire Alumni Of The Mafia”
As the tech industry has shifted to the right to cater to Trump, the Chamber of Progress has launched a number of initiatives to get Silicon Valley back in Democrats’ good graces.
In September 2025, the group launched what it called the Blue Horizon Project. The project was pitched as a way for Democrats to “assess the lessons of the 2024 election,” stating that “it’s clear the Party must rethink its approach to technology and innovation.”
To lead the initiative, the Chamber hired Dave Vorland, a former Defense Department staffer from the Obama and Biden administrations. Vorland also ran a lobbying group for tech companies, startups, and venture capitalists focused on lowering companies’ barriers to entry for government contracts, especially defense contracts.
In a November 2025 Blue Horizon post, Vorland threw his former employer under the bus, writing that the Biden administration “eschewed hiring leaders from the technology and innovation industries,” and that the Biden’s administration’s supposed cold shoulder toward tech “blunted its success.” Instead, Vorland advocated for Democrats to hire more tech employees, stating “you cannot effectively govern a tech-driven economy without people who understand tech from the inside.”
Vorland echoed such arguments in a Sept. 8 op-ed in a California-based news outlet, blaming Democrats for driving Silicon Valley away from the Party due to its “hostility toward the entire industry” and the Biden administration’s “suspicion” and “politically fraught” meetings with tech leaders.
“The tech industry didn’t suddenly become conservative,” Vorland wrote. “Democrats stopped sounding like the party of innovation.”
But hiring former tech employees and deferring to its leaders doesn’t boost innovation, said Hauser with the Revolving Door Project; it leads to corporate capture.
“If we want to protect society from the worst possible consequences of artificial intelligence, for example, we need to make sure that the cops on the beat are not looking to secure bags from the AI companies,” he said. “If you’re trying to protect people from the mafia, you don’t hire alumni of the mafia to spend four-year stints in government before returning to La Casa Nostra.”
Over the past few months, the Chamber began releasing a series of proposals for Democratic policymakers, called the Democratic AI Opportunity Agenda, with the goal of refocusing Democrats “on AI policies that create more economic, personal, and social opportunity for Americans.”
Part of that agenda involves laying the groundwork so the federal government can block state-level AI laws and safety regulations — long a priority for the AI industry and the Trump administration.
The proposal comes as about two-thirds of Americans believe that there is a moderate risk AI could destroy human civilization.
Among those concerned is the architect of Trump’s AI plan. After leaving the White House, the AI policy wonk has since admitted that he downplayed the tech’s existential risks because it would have limited his influence — and that “there are ways in which the rise of self-sovereign AI could go very, very poorly for human beings.”
“Focus On Trump”
Last month, Vorland, on behalf of the Chamber of Progress and the Blue Horizon Project, made his most explicit demand of Democrats yet: Forgo the subpoena and investigative powers awarded to Congress’ ruling party.
If Democrats win those powers in the midterm elections, wrote Vorland on the Blue Horizon Project Substack, the Party should keep it simple: “Focus on Trump.”
“Focusing instead on companies who may make easier oversight targets may increase voter anger at companies, but will do little to give Trump voters reason to switch parties next election cycle,” wrote Vorland. “Companies can be importantversight agenda.”
The Chamber of Progress has been arguing for years that Big Tech was Democrats’ ally. Now, proclaimed the lobbying group, they should still be the industry’s allies even after the industry’s leaders have happily taken up rightwing demands and flooded the GOP with political donations.
In other words, the Chamber of Progress wants lawmakers to overlook that many of its own “partners,” like Apple, Amazon, Google, Coinbase, Ripple, and a16z, have showered Trump with donations, praise, and WhiteHousevisits — all while being rewarded withlight-touch regulations, business-friendly policies, corporate tax cuts, and the elimination of cryptocurrency enforcement efforts.
“What looks like ‘bending the knee,’” wrote Vorland, “may be better understood as risk management.”
Kovacevich spoke similarly when talking to The Lever.
“You shouldn’t confuse CEOs having to go build a relationship with Trump with sort of where companies are,” he said. “Companies in general don’t endorse candidates. Some high-profile individuals have been active with Trump, but in general, I find that companies kind of understand that they need to have bipartisan relationships over the long haul.”
But by waving away Silicon Valley’s acquiescence to Trump as risk management and bipartisan relationship-building, Chamber of Progress is whitewashing the pay-to-play tactics that have eaten away at voters’ confidence in government, said Hepner at the American Economic Liberties Project.
“The Chamber of Progress has to be seen as just one leg of the stool of how corporate power has taken over our politics,” said Hepner. “Big tech corporations have been involved in distorting our electionsgress is laundering the interests of corporate power as part of a broader strategy to distort our politics against the public interest in fair and reasonable regulation.”
Despite its political firepower and past successes, the Chamber of Progress’ laundering effort may be a tough sell, at least based on the online reaction to the operation’s recent call to action for Democrats to “focus on Trump,” rather than his tech allies.
As the top commenter on the Blue Horizon Project post put it, “This is a lot of words to basically justify the Nuremberg Defense for people who empowered Trump.”
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