By Chloe Rogers, communications fellow
People are struggling with rising costs, with the affordability crisis exacerbated by the Trump administration’s actions to prioritize Wall Street and corporations over people and communities. Recent policy changes are opening new doors for the predatory and opportunistic private equity industry to grow, including into workers’ 401(k) retirement accounts. These Wall Street firms are emboldened to extract wealth from the services and systems workers, families, and communities depend upon, in everything from housing to healthcare, to grocery stores, to first response services, childcare, and more. As a result, everyday people are left having to accept exorbitant prices, junk fees, and reduced quality of services and goods, while private equity barons continue to pad their well-lined coffers.
We have seen how every time the private equity playbook unfolds, everyday people and workers bear the costs and harms, while private equity executives get richer.
- In June 2026, a massive fire tore through a Lineage Logistics cold-storage warehouse in Los Angeles, sending smoke across surrounding neighborhoods, prompting evacuation orders, and costing the public millions in firefighting expenses. The cause of the fire has not been determined, but the financial story behind the warehouse is familiar. The private equity firm Bay Grove Capital built Lineage through more than 100 acquisitions of smaller companies, while the company has used sale-leasebacks, taken on associated debt, and conducted multiple rounds of layoffs.
- In 2024, entire hospital systems run by Steward Health Care came under grave scrutiny in the wake of private equity extraction. After Cerberus Capital Management acquired a Massachusetts hospital system and created Steward, the health system sold off the hospital real estate and made the hospital lease it back, eventually leaving it with roughly $400 million a year in rent for real estate it used to own. Cerberus executives walked away with about $800 million in profit. Steward was left struggling with debt before collapsing into bankruptcy, leaving workers, patients, and communities to absorb the fallout.
- In 2018, Toys ‘R’ Us, an 80 year old nationwide retail chain went bankrupt and laid off more than 33,000 workers, following years of extraction by KKR and Bain Capital, private equity firms that left the retail giant saddled with more than $5 billion in debt. The Wall Street firms walked away with nearly half a billion dollars in fees and interest extracted throughout their ownership of the company, and tried to evade severance payouts until retail workers under United For Respect fought for and won a $20 million hardship fund.
- A similar story unfolded at Envision Healthcare. Five years after KKR acquired the physician-staffing company, Envision filed for bankruptcy and workers faced layoffs. Yet the KKR fund that owned Envision had still generated a 19 percent net annualized return in the period leading up to the bankruptcy, according to the Wall Street Journal.
A burning warehouse, a bankrupt hospital system, and the collapse of a major retail chain may look like separate stories. But they expose the same fundamental imbalance: private equity firms can reap enormous rewards from the companies they control while workers, patients, and communities shoulder much of the risk when things go wrong.
People understand what is at stake. New polling commissioned by Americans for Financial Reform found that 83 percent of likely 2026 voters across party lines surveyed were concerned about Wall Street financial firms controlling health care and veterinary care, while 81 percent were concerned about their control of housing. By more than two to one, voters agreed that private equity’s pursuit of short-term profits makes essentials like housing and health care more expensive and worse rather than making markets more efficient.
Yet private equity’s footprint is poised to keep growing. Recent changes to the tax code have created additional benefits for private equity investments, while the Trump administration has moved to allow private equity firms to push into workers’ retirement accounts. And private equity firms have bought up life insurance companies to finance their risky practices with policyholders premiums.
That is why the Stop Wall Street Looting Act is so important. The legislation takes aim at the private equity playbook by making firms and executives responsible for certain debts and liabilities of the companies they control, limiting the fees and dividends they can extract, strengthening protections for workers and consumers when portfolio companies fail, and increasing transparency. It would also target sale-leaseback arrangements in health care like those that helped strip valuable real estate, like Steward did.
Private equity already reaches into nearly every corner of daily life, from hospitals and nursing homes to housing, retail and food distribution. Without strong guardrails, firms have both the incentives and the opportunity to reach even further. We cannot continue to force workers, families and communities to pay the price for Wall Street greed. It is imperative that Congress take a clear stand for the public over Wall Street and swiftly pass the Stop Wall Street Looting Act.