Democrats’ Fundraisers Are Also Running AI’s Congressional Access Operation– readsludge.com

Democratic fundraising consultants working for Senate campaigns, including those of Sen. Jacky Rosen and Rep. Haley Stevens, also run a nonprofit backed in part by Google and Amazon that has become one of the AI industry’s primary channels for cultivating relationships with the congressional staff overseeing federal AI legislation.

The Innovative Future Collective (IFC), founded by Democratic fundraising consultants Ashley Kennedy and Tonya Fulkerson, has spent the past year flying congressional aides on industry-guided tours of Google, Meta, Amazon, Palantir, Anduril, and other companies at the center of the AI industry’s campaign to shape federal AI policy, including its push to preempt state AI regulation. The nonprofit describes the trips, built around briefings from company policy executives for committee counsels and chiefs of staff overseeing AI legislation, as “educational,” and told Sludge in March that it “does not engage in advocacy.”

Though IFC does not disclose its donors, two companies whose executives regularly participate in its congressional programs, Google and Amazon, have identified IFC among the political and policy organizations they fund in their own public political-engagement disclosures.

Kennedy and Fulkerson own Fulkerson Kennedy & Company (FK&Co.), a political fundraising firm that has been paid nearly $3 million this election cycle for fundraising consulting services by Democratic campaigns and committees, according to Federal Election Commission records. Its clients include Sens. Chris Coons, Jacky Rosen, and Martin Heinrich; Reps. Chris Pappas and Haley Stevens, who are running for open Senate seats; and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. IFC’s first federal tax filing, covering 2025, shows the nonprofit paid $179,079 back to FK&Co. for “management, staffing, and fundraising services.”