Abstract: In the name of national security, the Trump administration has taken a stake in Intel, acquired a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, obtained equity stakes in critical minerals companies, and required semiconductor companies to pay the government a percentage of their profits from sales to China in exchange for export licenses. These actions mark a dramatic departure from the traditional U.S. capitalist system, which relies on the market, not the government, to pick winners and losers. Indeed, they carry overtones of a command economy. But as unusual and occasionally illegal as these developments are, they also build on a broader shift that has pushed U.S. companies into a central role in U.S. national security policy in the last decade. Recent administrations of both parties have invoked the mantra that “economic security is national security.” To implement that philosophy, they have relied heavily on economic tools, including sanctions, export controls, investment screening, and tariffs. While these tools provide important levers for the U.S. government to manage national security threats, their proliferation is also fostering deeper, more diverse, and riskier roles for companies in this new era. We identify five such roles. Companies are: 1) key to security supply chains, prompting government involvement in the companies; 2) front-line enforcers or self-enforcers of economic security; 3) national security proxies for the U.S. government; 4) sources of products that the government uses as negotiating leverage; and 5) sources of funds that the government can extract in exchange for national-security related approvals. These enhanced, often novel, and sometimes illegal roles for companies in the national security ecosystem pose disturbing costs to public law values, such as legality, rationality, accountability, and fairness. The government’s burgeoning reliance on companies to implement national security policy undercuts public law values by fostering incentives for companies and the government to act unlawfully, creating principal/agent problems, and undercutting transparency. The Trump administration’s latest moves go even further: by introducing profit motives into security-related decisions, they produce conflicts of interest, potential corruption, and decision-making distortions both for the government and for companies. This approach is especially pernicious in national security policy-making because the stakes are so high. The end result will be a United States that is both less safe and economically weaker. Because many of these corporate roles likely will continue in future administrations (whether Democratic or Republican), finding ways to minimize the risks to public law values is crucial. For each of the risks that we identify, we propose concrete measures that Congress, the Executive, companies, and even allied governments could undertake to mitigate the corrosive effects of corporate entanglement in U.S. national security policy going forward.