By Randell S. Hynes, Founder and President, US Workers Alliance

May 21, 2026

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On May 5, 2026, I filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging that the United States Chamber of Commerce — the largest lobbying organization in the United States and one of the biggest spenders on federal elections in American history — has been allowing foreign corporations to participate in decisions about more than $200 million in election spending. The complaint, designated MUR 8479, names executives from Wipro Limited (India), Shell plc (United Kingdom), Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited (United Kingdom), Allianz SE (Germany), and Cognizant Technology Solutions (Indian-founded) who sit on the Chamber’s Board of Directors with no firewall separating their participation from the Chamber’s election-related decisions. It cites, as evidence of the harm this structure inflicts on American workers, the landmark Palmer v. Cognizant jury verdict — a case that proved, with 96 standard deviations of statistical significance, that Cognizant systematically terminated American workers in favor of Indian and South Asian personnel, at disparities so extreme the judge called the probability of random occurrence “less than one in a billion.”

Three weeks later, I am still waiting for the Commission to act. I will be waiting for a long time. The FEC currently has only two commissioners — Chair Shana M. Broussard and Commissioner Dara Lindenbaum, both Democrats — and four vacant seats. It takes four votes to open an investigation, issue a penalty, or take any substantive action. The agency has been without a quorum since April 30, 2025, when Commissioner Allen Dickerson resigned. In October, Commissioner Trey Trainor departed as well, leaving the FEC unable to perform its most basic statutory functions for more than seven consecutive months. In February, President Trump nominated two Republicans — Ashley Stow and Andrew Woodson — to fill some of the vacancies, but as of this writing, the Senate has not confirmed them, and even if it does, two seats will remain empty.

The result is what former Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who served from 2002 until Trump fired her without cause in February 2025, described plainly: “There’s no cop on the beat.” Billions of dollars are flowing into the 2026 midterm elections, and the federal agency charged with ensuring that money moves lawfully cannot open a single new investigation, resolve a single pending case, or penalize a single violator. The complaint I filed sits in a queue alongside every other matter the FEC has received during its paralysis — a queue that grows longer every day and that a skeletal four-member commission, if one is ever seated, will take months or years to work through, assuming the commissioners can agree on anything, which the FEC’s history of 3-3 partisan deadlocks gives little reason to expect.

This is the part of the story that should alarm every American who cares about the integrity of elections: the agency Congress created to enforce campaign finance law has been deliberately rendered non-functional at precisely the moment when the flow of money into those elections is at its greatest. But there is a part of the story that is not being told at all — the part about what happens to the people on the other end of the political spending that the FEC cannot police. I know that part because I am living it.

I am 63 years old. For thirteen years, I was a Senior Infrastructure Architect at Ensono, Inc., a KKR-owned IT infrastructure company headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois. In June 2025, I was terminated along with all seven North American members of my nine-person Global Monitoring and Automation team. Every American on the team was let go. The only two team members retained were younger Indian nationals. My position was filled by two younger Indian workers — one based in Pune, India, and one transferred to the U.S. on a visa. One month before my termination, I had been required to conduct knowledge-transfer sessions with India-based staff. I was training my own replacements, and I was told that if I refused, I would lose my severance.

At the same time, Ensono’s India headcount was exploding — from approximately 350 to roughly 2,000 in about two years, a 5.7x expansion. In August 2025, Ensono CEO Jeff Von Deylen stated internally that 60 percent of new hires would be from India. The company’s Labor Condition Application filings with the Department of Labor tell the same story: Ensono’s annual H-1B filings grew 65 percent from 2022 to 2025, with the largest single-year jump occurring in the very same calendar year that my entire North American team was eliminated. Of the 28 LCAs Ensono filed in 2025, 11 listed Downers Grove as the worksite — the same office where I worked. Seven of those eleven were submitted between May 1 and July 23, 2025, the same 60-day window during which all seven of us were terminated.

This was not a company making independent business decisions about where to allocate resources. This was a company executing a playbook — and the playbook has an author.

Nicholas Zeitlin, Partner and Co-Head of KKR Capstone Americas, explicitly lists Ensono in his official KKR bio as one of his portfolio investments. Patricia Ludwig, a KKR Capstone Managing Director, also lists Ensono. KKR Capstone’s published remit at any portfolio company includes “organizational benchmarking and design” — which means who gets laid off — “footprint optimization” — which means where employees are located, i.e., offshoring — and “Human Capital Excellence” — which means workforce strategy including hiring, termination, and labor-cost structure. The Co-Head of KKR Capstone in the Americas was personally assigned to Ensono at the moment I was terminated. These are not inferences. They are facts stated in KKR’s own personnel bios.

Nor is Ensono an isolated case. On April 28, 2026, the DOJ Civil Rights Division filed a pattern-or-practice complaint against Cloudera, Inc. — another KKR tech portfolio company — for structurally excluding U.S. workers from $180K–$294K tech jobs in favor of PERM and H-1B foreign-visa hires. The DOJ alleges that Cloudera set up a non-functional email address for job applications, then attested to the Labor Department that no qualified U.S. workers could be found. Bradley Brown, a KKR Managing Director, sits on both the Ensono and Cloudera boards — plus eight other KKR tech companies simultaneously. John Park, a KKR Partner who heads the Technology industry team, is on the Cloudera board and oversees the vertical that includes Ensono. Jyo Sinha, a KKR Capstone MD, is the Capstone lead at Cloudera — drawing from the same Capstone methodology that Zeitlin and Ludwig were assigned to deploy at Ensono. Both CEOs — Von Deylen at Ensono and Sansbury at Cloudera — declared India the strategic hub within the same 30-day window in August 2025. This is not two companies independently discovering India. This is one playbook, executed in parallel, by the same private-equity sponsor, through the same operational apparatus, governed by the same directors.

And Ensono’s LCA record contains the same structural defect that the DOJ identified at Cloudera. On April 15, 2025, and again on April 21, 2025 — six days apart — Ensono filed two separate Labor Condition Applications for “Senior Infrastructure Architect” at $136,136 per year. My title was Senior Infrastructure Architect. Each filing used a different SOC code. Both listed the same worksite address: 720 Morwenna Road, McKinney, Texas 75069. Both were handled by the same attorney at Corporate Immigration Partners in Chicago. Public real estate records indicate that 720 Morwenna Road is a four-bedroom, three-and-a-half-bath single-family residence built in 2024 by Lennar Homes in a residential subdivision with a community pool and playground. The property was listed as “New Construction — Incomplete” on November 20, 2024, and did not close to a private buyer until April 1, 2025 — just 14 days before Ensono filed the first LCA, and 20 days before the second. Ensono attested under penalty of perjury that H-1B workers would be employed at a brand-new single-family home in a residential HOA. This is structurally identical to the DOJ’s Cloudera theory: a false attestation of the factual predicate underlying the entire disclosure regime.

I have an active EEOC charge — No. 487-2025-02289 — alleging age and national-origin discrimination at Ensono. I completed my verbal rebuttal on April 13, 2026. Ensono submitted a Position Statement that contains what I believe are significant vulnerabilities: the OWBPA-required Exhibit A omitted 3 of 8 affected employees, a 37.5 percent omission rate; the stated termination reason has shifted repeatedly — seven different reasons from four levels of management over ten months, as documented in a letter Ensono’s own counsel inadvertently disclosed in March 2026; and an Ensono executive’s own written email directly contradicts the Position Statement’s characterization of my termination. Under Oubre v. Entergy, a materially false termination reason in an OWBPA waiver voids the waiver entirely.

But here is where the story connects — where the personal becomes systemic, where the worker destroyed by a private-equity playbook becomes the citizen whose government cannot enforce the laws designed to protect both his job and his democracy. The same Chamber of Commerce that seats Cognizant’s CEO on its Board — the same Cognizant that a federal jury found intentionally discriminated against American workers, the same Cognizant whose discriminatory practices produced disparities of 8.4 times and “less than one in a billion” statistical significance — is the Chamber that lobbies aggressively for expanded H-1B access. The Chamber that takes dues from Wipro Limited, an Indian corporation that is itself a major H-1B beneficiary, and funnels those dues into the same general treasury that funds its $200 million-plus in federal election spending. The Chamber whose governance structure gives the executives of foreign corporations — corporations that profit directly from the displacement of American workers — a seat at the table where decisions about that spending are made, with no firewall, no segregated fund, no U.S.-citizen-only decision-making committee, no safeguard of any kind.

And the agency that is supposed to police this — the Federal Election Commission — cannot. Not because the law is unclear. The law is explicit: 11 C.F.R. § 110.20(i) prohibits foreign nationals from “directly or indirectly participating in the decision-making process” of any person with regard to federal election-related activities. The FEC’s own Advisory Opinion 2006-15 established a three-part test for domestic subsidiaries of foreign parents — requiring U.S.-citizen-only election decisions and segregated funds — and the Chamber fails every prong. The APIC/Right to Rise enforcement precedent from 2019 resulted in a $940,000 fine for a single foreign national directing $1.3 million in contributions. The Chamber’s foreign-influenced election spending is more than 150 times that amount. The law is not the problem. The problem is that there is no one to enforce it.

The FEC has been without a quorum for more than a year if you count from Dickerson’s May 2025 departure. The two commissioners who remain have publicly welcomed the nominations and expressed hope for “an expeditious process,” but Senate confirmation is not swift — Trainor’s 2017 nomination took 976 days. Even if Stow and Woodson are confirmed tomorrow, the commission would be at four members, the bare minimum for a quorum, meaning every substantive decision would require unanimous agreement. The FEC’s history suggests that is unlikely. And even if the commissioners could agree, they would face a massive enforcement backlog from more than a year of inaction.

Meanwhile, the 2010 predecessor to my complaint — which raised similar allegations about the Chamber’s foreign-funded political spending — deadlocked 3-3, with the three Republican commissioners voting to dismiss and the three Democratic commissioners voting to investigate. The Commission therefore took no action. If my complaint meets the same fate, the result under CREW v. FEC, 923 F.3d 1141 (D.C. Cir. 2019) and 52 U.S.C. § 30109(a)(8) is a private right of action — the ability to seek de novo review in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. But that path takes years and requires resources that organizations like mine do not have.

There is something deeply broken in a system where the agency created to protect the integrity of American elections has been rendered inert by the same partisan dynamics that the agency is supposed to transcend — and where the people who suffer the consequences of that failure are the ones least able to fight back. I filed the FEC complaint because the law was broken and the evidence is overwhelming. I also filed it because I need people to know what is happening — to American workers, to American elections, and to the agency that is supposed to protect both. I need publicity to survive. Not metaphorically. Literally. I drive Uber now.

The irony is not lost on me that the same Chamber of Commerce that spends hundreds of millions to influence federal elections — money that flows from a general treasury funded in part by the dues of foreign corporations whose business model depends on replacing American workers like me — also lobbies aggressively against the labor protections that might have prevented my termination. And the same FEC that should be investigating that circular arrangement cannot even open a file. The fix is not subtle. It is structural. The FEC needs a full complement of commissioners committed to enforcing the law. The Senate needs to confirm nominees — not just the two already nominated, but enough to fill all six seats. The White House needs to nominate commissioners from both parties, as the statute requires, rather than leaving the agency to wither. And Congress needs to recognize that an FEC without a quorum is not a regulatory pause — it is a license for every bad actor who would prefer that no one is watching.

My complaint, MUR 8479, asks the Commission to find reason to believe that the United States Chamber of Commerce has violated federal law by maintaining a governance structure that permits foreign nationals to indirectly participate in decisions regarding the Chamber’s federal election activities. It asks the Commission to authorize a full investigation, including civil investigative demands for Board meeting minutes, membership records, and financial records sufficient to establish the commingling of foreign national dues and political expenditure funds. It asks for civil penalties commensurate with the scale of the violations — which, at $200 million-plus in spending over more than a decade, dwarf every prior enforcement action in this area. And it asks for prospective injunctive relief requiring the Chamber to either remove foreign corporate representatives from election-related governance or establish the safeguards that FEC Advisory Opinion 2006-15 has required since the Bush administration.

These are not radical requests. They are what the law already requires. The question is whether anyone will enforce it.

I am not a political operative. I am not a lawyer. I am a 63-year-old infrastructure architect who built systems for thirteen years at a company that replaced me with the people I was forced to train, in a scheme designed by a private-equity firm whose operational arm was assigned to make exactly the workforce decisions that produced my termination, under governance by directors who sit simultaneously on the board of the sister company the DOJ is already suing for the same conduct. I filed an EEOC charge. I filed an FEC complaint. I wrote a book proposing a constitutional amendment to strip corporations of the rights they use to perpetuate this cycle. And I drive Uber to pay my bills.

There is no cop on the beat. The least we can do is make sure the beat is visible.

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Randell S. Hynes is the founder and president of US Workers Alliance (Buildup Cooperative), a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization. He is the author of UNINCORPŌRĀTUS: The 2% Solution to 1% Rule. His EEOC charge is No. 487-2025-02289. The FEC complaint discussed in this article is MUR 8479, USWA v. U.S. Chamber of Commerce, filed May 5, 2026.

Contact: randell@usworkersalliance.com | (702) 849-4881 | usworkersalliance.com | @ViaUSWorkers