The crises are piling up fast and furiously. Billionaires are running the country, upending the rule of law, supplying armaments for wars abroad and robots to replace us in our jobs, all while marching our economy to the brink of disaster. Closer to home, corporate power and tax-averse billionaires stand in the way of struggles to secure health care, housing, and life’s basic necessities. They’re deeply entangled in all of Donald Trump’s outrages.

There are plenty of signs that this is not sitting well with everyday people. Last month, New York City voters chose a democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, to stand as Democratic nominee in November’s mayoral election. Shortly before that, we saw record-breaking mass demonstrations opposing Trump’s authoritarianism in all fifty states. But aside from waiting for the next election and registering discontent in the streets, how can this energy be channeled to change our bleak trajectory?

A critical first step is recognizing the extent to which corporate America, especially the tech industry, is enabling Trump. If that connection can be made, an under-the-radar opportunity emerges that can push back on this ruthless tide: shifting how public funds are invested.

On the surface, redirecting public funds may hardly seem like a headline-grabbing path forward. But when we consider that retirement systems and municipal treasuries hold billions of dollars of investments in companies like Tesla and nations like Israel, that lever starts to look pretty powerful. We could pry billions of dollars of public money out of such wildly risky investments — for the future of our cities, states, and country.

“Billions” is no exaggeration. As of April, the retirement systems for California public workers and teachers alone (CalPERS and CalSTERS, respectively) own more than nine million shares of Tesla stock. That means that the pension portfolios of more than three million California workers are bound to the rise and fall of a single highly volatile company.

Meanwhile, at least $1.6 billion from state and local treasuries across the country are sunk into Israeli bonds. Governments have been buying up Israeli bonds for decades, but recently some have increased their investments for symbolic reasons: to show political support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. But credit agencies have downgraded Israel’s credit rating twice in the past nineteen months because of the increasing instability of its economy. Our governments are risking their constituents’ financial futures to make a political point in support of genocide.

There are overwhelming moral arguments to be made for divesting public funds from companies owned by tyrants or governments that are engaged in an ongoing genocide. But even in the bloodless logic of finance, getting retirement funds and municipal budgets out of danger is a sound investment strategy — especially with a job market crisis, the precarity of the social security system, and a recession barreling toward us.

Divestment is hardly a radical proposition. It can be done, and it’s been done before. Just last month, in Lehigh County, Pennsylvania, residents successfully moved their pension board to stop all new investments in Tesla. The board agreed to pause investments in a 4–2 vote and also resolved to create a plan for divesting existing shares in the company. New York state representatives are currently pushing to divest from Tesla too. In the past, the New York pension fund divested from Exxon, and California came close to divesting from fossil fuels as well before the initiative stalled out last year.

Smaller-scale local divestment wins are already happening too. After pressure from students, the University of San Francisco recently divested from defense companies with ties to Israel. Cuyahoga County in Ohio froze $3 million in Israeli bonds. And the United Methodist Church even voted to divest from Israeli and other occupier nations’ bonds.

Despite the Trump administration’s avalanche of outrages and the creeping feeling that our futures are being foreclosed upon without our input, we can wrest back meaningful control by building local pressure campaigns to ensure that our fortunes are no longer invested in volatile companies and genocidal nations with unstable economies. We deserve safe retirements and stable government funding. With divestment, we have the power and opportunity to fight for balance sheets that can help to produce a better future.