Thrive Capital has bet big on artificial intelligence, including emerging giants of the field like OpenAI and Databricks.

Now the venture capital firm is taking a different approach: creating and buying companies that it believes can benefit from A.I. — including in industries that seem far more humdrum, such as accounting — and holding on to them for a long time.

Thrive Capital is raising money for a company it has created called Thrive Holdings, which is meant to develop and buy start-ups, according to four people with knowledge of the matter. The idea is to help operate the businesses, and use the cash flow to both invest in the companies and buy up others.

The firm is in the late stages of closing about $1 billion for Thrive Holdings’ initial round of funding, according to one of the people with knowledge of the matter. The first investors include Thrive Capital’s existing group of backers, including pension funds and endowments.

But because Thrive Holdings is essentially being set up as a permanent capital vehicle, it can keep raising money over the years, these people said.

In many ways, it’s an unusual bet by Thrive Capital. The firm, which was founded in 2010 by Joshua Kushner, made its name betting on fast-growing and soon-to-be-prominent start-ups, including Instagram, the payment processor Stripe and Kim Kardashian’s Skims.

More recently, it has concentrated on A.I. businesses, having led an OpenAI funding round in October that valued the ChatGPT maker at $157 billion, as well as investments in Anysphere, an A.I. coding tool, and Isomorphic Labs, an A.I. drug researcher owned by Google.

Thrive Holdings appears to be particularly interested in everyday industries. Thrive Capital has already backed two companies that fit this mold: Crete, an accounting company, and Long Lake, which has focused on buying managers of homeowner associations. Thrive Holdings has already started investing in complementary areas, such as I.T. service providers, these people said.

Other venture capital firms have publicly committed to a serial acquisition strategy, known in the finance world as a roll-up. General Catalyst, for example, explicitly promoted its plan to support “A.I.-enabled roll-ups” when it led a fund-raising round for Eudia, an A.I.-enabled legal services company. (It has also invested in Long Lake.) Others betting on a similar strategy include the firm 8VC.

The idea is these businesses can be made vastly more efficient by incorporating A.I.; Long Lake, for example, uses such software to automate the operations of homeowner associations.

But unlike roll-ups done by Wall Street mainstays like private equity firms, the venture firms are targeting younger companies. Thrive Holdings also plans to focus heavily on the operations of the businesses it buys, in part by using a team of software engineers and Thrive’s ties to A.I. companies like OpenAI, these people said.

Thrive Holdings also differs from other venture firms via its setup as a so-called holding company that can own stakes in companies for a long time, even “forever,” one of the people with knowledge of the company said.

Over its 15-year existence, Thrive Capital and its executives, including Mr. Kushner, have incubated more than a dozen companies. At least five have valuations exceeding $1 billion. Among them is Oscar Health, the health insurer driven by its use of technology, though its current market value of $3 billion is roughly a third of where it stood when it went public in 2021.

Other businesses that Thrive Capital has incubated include the health care billing company Cedar, the health benefits app Rightway Healthcare, the virtual patient care management start-up Cadence and the online pharmacy Capsule.

An independent federal watchdog has opened more than three dozen investigations into the Trump administration to determine if it has illegally withheld billions of dollars in congressionally approved funds, raising the odds of a high-stakes constitutional clash over the power of the government’s purse.

The acknowledgment by the Government Accountability Office came on Tuesday, as House and Senate Democrats estimated for the first time that President Trump might have blocked the delivery of at least $430 billion during his first 100 days in office. That imperiled money enacted for foreign aid, green energy, health and transportation-related programs, potentially in violation of the law.

The dispute originates in Mr. Trump’s vast, chaotic and continued reconfiguration of the federal government. Since the first days of Mr. Trump’s term, he and his top advisers — including the tech billionaire Elon Musk — have shuttered programs while blocking or slowing a wide array of funds seen as wasteful, unnecessary or incompatible with the president’s broader political agenda.

Many Democrats and legal scholars contend that Mr. Trump’s budget maneuvers violate the Constitution, which vest the powers to tax and spend with Congress, not the executive branch. The spending interruptions have also prompted a wave of court challenges as state officials, nonprofits and other federal aid recipients say the White House has acted illegally.

On Tuesday, Gene L. Dodaro, the comptroller general of the Government Accountability Office, revealed at a congressional hearing that his office had opened “39 different investigations” into the administration. He suggested some of the focus was on cuts or changes to spending at the Education Department, the Environmental Protection Agency and other major federal offices.

Under a 1970s law, the Government Accountability Office has the power to investigate whether an administration has improperly withheld authorized funding in defiance of Congress. The watchdog has the power to sue if it finds the administration illegally impounds funds.

Mr. Dodaro did not signal how his office might proceed. He told lawmakers that some federal agencies had not been “responsive” to his requests for information, while the White House’s budget office had largely ignored his entreaties.

“We’re trying to get information from the agencies about what their legal position is for not expending the money,” Mr. Dodaro said.

He acknowledged the inquiries after questioning from Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, who leads her party on the chamber’s top appropriations panel. Earlier on Tuesday, Ms. Murray and her counterpart in the House, Representative Rosa DeLauro, Democrat of Connecticut, issued the estimate that more than $400 billion in congressionally-appropriated funds had been slowed or blocked under Mr. Trump.

At the hearing, Ms. Murray faulted Mr. Trump for having “unilaterally frozen” funds in ways that “wreaked havoc for our families and communities across the country.”

A spokeswoman for the White House budget office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Government Accountability Office declined to comment further.

The inquiries seemed to raise the likelihood of a legal showdown between Mr. Trump, congressional Democrats and the Government Accountability Office, a powerful yet little-known independent watchdog. The office has largely remained unscathed even as the president has taken aim at other areas of oversight, including firing ethics officials such as the nation’s inspectors general.

At the heart of the battle is the president’s ability to invoke a power known as impoundment, which would allow Mr. Trump to stem the flow of federal dollars even if Congress instructs otherwise. Mr. Trump and his top budget adviser, Russell T. Vought, argue that a decades-old law restricting impoundment is unconstitutional, maintaining instead that the president should possess expansive authorities to reconfigure federal spending.

“The president ran on the notion that the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional,” Mr. Vought told lawmakers at a confirmation hearing this year, referring to the 1970s law that specifies controls over the president’s spending powers. “I agree with that.”

Mr. Vought similarly encouraged Mr. Trump to impound federal funds during his first term. In a legal memo issued at the end of the administration, Mr. Vought wrote at the time that existing law “limits the executive branch’s ability to spend appropriations effectively.”

But the matter most notably came to a head in 2020, during Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, when the Government Accountability Office found that the administration had violated the law by withholding roughly $400 million in aid to Ukraine in defiance of Congress. Mr. Vought defended his office’s actions at the time. In January, he told lawmakers that the administration had “engaged in a policy process” and ultimately released the funds “by the end of the fiscal year.”

The dozens of new investigations are set to proceed as Mr. Trump prepares to issue his budget for the 2026 fiscal year, which is expected to propose deep cuts to many domestic programs, including child care, education, health and housing initiatives targeting the poor.

The president is expected to couple that blueprint with a formal, legal request to Congress to cancel spending previously authorized for the current fiscal year, predominately targeting billions of dollars in foreign aid and money for public broadcasting.

President Trump has expressed little interest in fighting climate change. One of his key cabinet officials has even sought to evaluate whether humanity benefits from a warming climate, in a bid to undermine environmental rules.

Yet even as he works to accelerate oil and gas production, Mr. Trump’s economic approach may inadvertently reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as consumption slows in response to a global trade war.

Any reprieve for the planet, however, would be brief. Over the longer term, tanking the economy with tit-for-tat tariffs is likely to impede progress, because of how much clean energy deployment depends on overseas supply chains and because voters are less likely to support climate policy when they’re financially stressed.

Carbon emissions, largely a byproduct of going places and making things, have always been tethered to economic growth. Forecasters increasingly anticipate that Mr. Trump’s aggressive use of tariffs could tip the economy into recession as companies and consumers cut spending in the face of higher prices for imported goods.

“If we’re talking about a traditional recession, people fly less, they buy less stuff, there’s less investment in capital goods,” said Alex Heil, a senior economist at the Conference Board, who focuses on energy and climate. “And just a slowdown in economic activity is likely to slow down carbon emissions.”

That is what happened in the last two recessions. Global carbon emissions dipped slightly, before resuming their upward march. (Emissions in the United States continued to decline after 2008 as cheap natural gas displaced coal, and it’s possible that a similar peak is nearing for the rest of the world.)

There are already signs of this happening: Airlines are forecasting lower traffic, and fewer homes are being built. After the pre-tariff panic buying is done, consumer-oriented companies are expecting lower sales as customers pare their shopping lists. The end of the de minimis exemption, which allowed shipments worth up to $800 to enter the country tariff-free, may result in many fewer flimsy but trendy clothing items flown across the ocean.

There’s a certain irony here: U.S. environmentalists have long sought to impose some kind of tax on carbon, in order to discourage dirty products and encourage cleaner ones. Tariffs discourage people from buying foreign products, and plenty of those are also carbon intensive. So although a carbon tax would lower emissions more directly — Europe is even planning a new tariff system targeted at carbon intensive goods — broad tariffs are better than nothing, from a climate perspective.

It’s also true that globalization fueled the explosion of climate-warming gases by making it possible for the citizens of wealthier countries to fill their large houses with toys, furniture and cars at a low cost. As environmental regulations tightened in Europe and the United States, more polluting factories moved to developing countries with looser rules.

But it’s not clear that a trade war will run that process in reverse, because of the thicket of countervailing effects it creates. For one thing, even as the United States imposes tariffs, shipments of goods may simply be redirected, rather than falling overall.

“The question is, are we really looking at substantially reduced cross-border trade, or are we just looking at different cross-border trade?” said Ethan Zindler, chief policy analyst at BloombergNEF. “If you take trade route A versus trade route B, it might have higher emissions. So it’s very hard to know.”

Even if international shipping declined, and tariffs redirected consumption toward domestic goods, that wouldn’t necessarily help. Most emissions associated with global freight actually come in the last-mile delivery via truck from ports of entry to warehouses and retailers.

Moreover, if the world did return to an age in which countries bought more within their own borders — and that’s a big “if” — building new factories that may not operate as efficiently as China’s enormous industrial zones could end up increasing the carbon required to produce a sofa or a pair of shoes.

The bigger factor for emissions in the medium term would be how trade restrictions and an economic downturn affected new sources of electricity.

Recessions always bring down gas prices; concerns about the Trump administration’s economic policy have already done so. Tariffs on steel and aluminum are also making it more expensive to get oil rigs up and running, which has slowed down drilling.

But tariffs cut both ways for energy, and renewable sources may suffer even more. Solar arrays, wind farms and electric vehicles are currently built with goods produced in other countries, including batteries and turbines, most of which are now subjected to tariffs of at least 10 percent. (For solar panels, the duties are far higher.) Retaliatory measures, such as China’s export controls on rare earth minerals needed in clean energy technologies, will magnify the effect.

The Biden administration worked to build up domestic sources of solar panels, batteries and other parts needed to build renewable energy, supported with billions of dollars in subsidies. It also used tariffs to protect some of those industries, and planned for more when they were up and running. But they’re currently not producing nearly enough to supply domestic demand.

“Where we are in the process now is we’re building the factories, now we need the equipment to put in the factories, and that takes a lot of steel,” said Eric Van Nostrand, who ran economic policy at the Treasury Department under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Tariffs on steel make that harder, and investment is already wilting in the face of high interest rates and the possibility that Congress will curtail the clean energy tax credits in the Inflation Reduction Act.

Trade barriers also make it more difficult to adapt when climate-related disasters hit. When a drought wipes out a wheat or soybean crop, shifting to imports without having to pay exorbitant taxes can cushion the blow. And rebuilding after a hurricane or a wildfire is much more costly without imported lumber, cement and appliances.

And economic downturns are hard on average consumers, who lose jobs and have their hours cut. Even if they might do fewer loads of laundry to save on their energy bills, investing in an electric vehicle or a heat pump for their house becomes more difficult (and will be even more so if Congress repeals Biden-era subsidies for those items).

“Recessions are not times when people decide to spend a lot of money to upgrade their washing machines to a more energy-efficient one,” said Brian Prest, a fellow at Resources for the Future, an energy-focused think tank. Holding back the upgrade cycle can keep emissions from falling as much as they might have in a healthy economy.

But the more important implications of a trade war and ensuing recession would kick in over the longer term, and none of them are good for the climate.

First, the path of decarbonization depends a lot on how quickly technology progresses. As trade barriers rise, exporting to other countries becomes more difficult. That shrinks the market available for entrepreneurs, reducing the incentive to take risks and invest.

Second, even if Americans elect a more climate-friendly president and Congress in the coming years, recessions typically don’t lend themselves to ambitious environmental policy. Relieving immediate financial pain tends to take priority, said Jonas Meckling, a climate fellow at Harvard Business School.

“If this results in a contraction of economic growth, then we know that climate won’t be a top agenda item for voters, and everything will focus much more on just stimulating the economy,” Dr. Meckling said. It’s already happening up north: Faced with rising joblessness and high costs, Canada has backed off on its own consumer carbon tax.

That’s also true on an international level. Economic insecurity focuses nations inward, when dealing with climate change requires international cooperation. Festering global conflicts are also pushing leaders to focus their resources on building up their militaries, leaving less money to support a transition to low-carbon energy, industrial processes and agriculture.

That’s why climate economists take little solace in even the carbon silver lining of any impending recession.

“Emissions may drop a bit because of a bit less economic activity,” said Brian Copeland, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia. “But I think it just makes the long-run transition to a less carbon intensive society harder.”