After a stunning night, the US midterm results are in. Democrats won control of both the House and the Senate with James Talarico beating Ken Paxton in Texas, the first Democrat to win a Senate seat there since 1988, after Elon Musk spent more than $150 million against him. His line in a CBS interview this morning was that, “Texas is not for sale.” Jon Ossoff defeated Mike Collins in Georgia and was leading by about 18 points this morning. Republican-held Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina and Kansas flipped too.

For companies, the more near-term consequence is who gets to ask the questions and what power they have to actually demand answers. Senator Ron Wyden, who will likely chair the Finance Committee, has signaled investigations into banks, health insurers and pharmaceutical companies. The election itself doesn’t remove existing tariffs, and current government funding expires December 11 unless Congress acts.

So my read is that major partisan legislation will be harder to pass, but investigations do give the incoming majority a way to scrutinize companies without first having to get the president’s agreement, and that includes the ballroom donations, the dinner at the club, the investment number announced from the Oval Office. A decision doesn’t have to have broken the law to become the subject of a congressional inquiry. And the White House still matters to business, but an explanation designed to satisfy it may now have to withstand scrutiny from people investigating it.

The most important role of a CCO is to look around corners before the CEO has to, and a change of control in Congress is one of the few moments when the corner is right in front of us.

So here are a few considerations as you move through the next few weeks:

Start with the corner you can already see around.

On October 21, Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff about the $1 million Benioff gave personally (as well as the $2 million Salesforce gave) toward the new White House ballroom. The letter asks who solicited the money, how the amount was decided, whether anything was put in writing, why the gift was kept anonymous, and requested every lobbying contact with the administration since January 2025. Similar letters went to a dozen other donors including the CEOs of Cisco and ServiceNow.

Blumenthal sent those as the senior Democrat on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a small panel whose whole job is running inquiries. As the minority member he couldn’t make anyone answer and so some companies sent back a polite paragraph and moved on.

But if Blumenthal returns as chairman and the current rules remain in place, he’d be able to authorize subpoenas without a committee vote or Republican consent. Blumenthal has held that chair before and used it; he subpoenaed Live Nation in 2023. So a request a company declined to answer voluntarily in October could become a demand for documents backed by a subpoena in January.

Then look at the corners you’re closer to than you think.

You don’t have to be a ballroom donor to face scrutiny. Wyden called out banks, insurers and pharma. Talarico won Texas partly on regulating data centers. And according to TIME, executives were already lawyering up before the vote and calling Democratic members to make their case. PwC’s advice before the election was that more public and targeted oversight could be a more significant consequence for businesses than new legislation.

For CCOs, I’d sync with your government affairs team on a couple of things. Which existing inquiries identify us, a deal we were part of, or a business practice we share with the companies being questioned? Which lawmakers pursuing those inquiries are likely to get new authority over them? Start there rather than treating every political criticism as an impending investigation. If you’re headquartered outside the US, don’t assume that insulates the American business. Blumenthal subpoenaed the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s U.S. subsidiary in 2023.

Put the public explanation next to the record.

Legal will direct the review of the underlying documents, that’s their job. Our job is to look at the messaging, so pull up what we’ve previously said, compare it to whatever the paperwork shows, and push on whether someone reading both would feel like we left something out.

ServiceNow is a good example of why that matters because what they said is what most of us would say. “The deal was in the works before the donation.” Fine. Now prove it. Show the receipts. Saying the same thing louder doesn’t count for much and if the paper trail doesn’t match the messaging, better legal hears it from us than from a committee. And if the records expose a problem with the decision itself, fixing the wording won’t resolve it.

Same goes for anything we’ve already sent back. Blumenthal first questioned Clark Construction, the builder of the ballroom in October 2025 and then in June 2026, he publicly called its response “entirely inadequate” and requested more information. Whatever you sent when you didn’t have to is now your opening statement, whether you meant it as one or not.

Set the tripwires and the lanes.

Anything a lawmaker has already asked needs one accountable owner, a record of what we’ve supplied, and a clear view of outstanding requests and deadlines. If a new letter shows up, legal, government affairs and comms needs to read it and assess it together and agree on what it’s asking and when it’s due. Agree upfront around what requires escalation: a request naming the CEO, a demand for internal communications, invitation to testify, or a material mismatch between an earlier answer and the records. Each should trigger a joint review and an explicit decision on CEO or board involvement.

And know your lane, which is going to depend entirely on your unique org chart. Some of us own government affairs, some of us sit next to it, and either way the committee hears from the lawyers and the government relations people, not from comms. What matters is that you’re in the room with them on a regular basis. A standing check-in, a shared list of what’s open, and one version of the story everyone is working from. Our job is making sure three things say the same thing: what we send the committee, what we say publicly, and what the CEO says the next time an analyst asks. The level of detail will differ but the answers cannot contradict one another.

So as you head into the next few weeks, push on which decisions your CEO is most likely to have to explain again and what you can show to back up the answer. Looking around corners here isn’t about predicting what Congress will do as much as it is reading your own past words the way a hostile reader will, before the hostile reader shows up.