WASHINGTON – At Axios House D.C. on July 14, policymakers and business leaders gathered under sponsorship from Accenture and Ford to talk about America's next phase of economic growth, with the whole conversation built around whether the U.S. can outcompete rivals in AI, energy and advanced manufacturing. The people making the decisions sat in the room. The people who'll live with the consequences did not.
Who Gets to Set the Terms
Axios' Nathan Bomey, Neil Irwin, Colin Demarest, Mike Allen, Courtenay Brown and Ben Geman hosted conversations with NYSE Group president Lynn Martin; Rep. Gregory Meeks (D-N.Y.); Kalshi co-founder and CEO Tarek Mansour; Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Michael Selig; Zillow Group CEO Jeremy Wacksman; Northrop Grumman chair, CEO and president Kathy Warden; U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer; and Southern Company chair, president and CEO Chris Womack. That's the apparatus speaking to itself, with corporate power and state power sharing the same microphone.
Meeks said he was worried the Iran war will become this generation's "forever war," and he criticized President Trump for using "basically real estate negotiators" in diplomatic talks. On Trump's strategy, Meeks said: "I don't think that you're going to be able to bomb yourself out of this." The war machine keeps grinding, and even the people inside the political class can see the dead end.
Who Pays for the Race
Martin said AI's biggest economic opportunities will come from energy and infrastructure, predicting both sectors are positioned for "outsized returns for a longer period of time." That means the profits flow upward while the costs of power, land, and buildout land somewhere below. The language is all opportunity. The bill is another matter.
Selig said the CFTC will defend its authority over prediction markets "all the way up to the Supreme Court" if necessary as the battle to regulate prediction markets intensifies. The fight here isn't about freedom for ordinary people. It's about which arm of the state gets to police a new corner of finance.
Mansour said prediction markets are "here to stay" because many people feel traditional financial systems are "rigged against them." That line lands because people already know the game is fixed. The question is who gets to run the rigging.
Greer said the U.S. won't let Europe become "the arbiter" of regulating American tech companies as the world is still figuring out how to regulate tech companies. The bosses of tech don't want one set of rulers replacing another. They want room to keep extracting while governments argue over jurisdiction.
What They're Calling Growth
U.S. energy demand is growing, and Womack said the U.S. needs to commit to building 10 new nuclear plants to meet that demand. Big numbers, bigger institutions, and the same old pattern: decisions made at the top, consequences spread everywhere else.
Wacksman said the homebuying process has become so complicated that half of Americans cry at some point during the process, according to Zillow's 2022 study. That's what the market does when housing gets treated like a machine for profit instead of a place to live. Even the paperwork becomes a form of pressure.
In a sponsored conversation, Ford Motor Company executive chair Bill Ford said most of America's critical minerals come from China. He said the U.S. has them, but it doesn't have the proper regulation to develop those minerals. To compete with China, Ford said a bipartisan industrial policy is needed. "Having a planning horizon that we can count on makes a huge difference, because our lead times are longer than political lead times," Ford said. He also said flying cars are "very possible." The planning horizon he wants is for capital, not for the people who'll bear the extraction, the delays, and the fallout.
In a View from the Top conversation, Accenture Federal Services CEO Ron Ash said the U.S. is in a prototyping bubble. "My biggest concern is that we win this race for developing the best AI technology and we lose the race to deploy it," he said. That's the whole racket in one sentence: build the machine, then rush it into the world before anyone can stop to ask who it serves.
The July 14 event was sponsored by Accenture and Ford. The names on the stage changed, but the structure didn't. Corporate sponsors, state officials, and industry executives gathered to map out a future where the public gets the costs, the firms get the returns, and the language of progress does the masking.