In mid-April 2023, Blackstone's CEO and other executives of the giant landlord gave Bryan Steil $27,100. On April 26 he voted for a House Republican bill that housing experts estimated would leave about 2 million people without rental assistance. Two months later came the bank checks.
Tom Kean Jr. cosponsored the ORPHAN Cures Act, which rode into Trump's budget bill and pushed back Medicare's power to negotiate prices on blockbuster cancer drugs. The Congressional Budget Office says it handed a multibillion-dollar windfall to drugmakers including Merck and Johnson & Johnson — two companies whose stock sits in Kean's own portfolio.
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Ann Wagner walked into Congress with a few million dollars and today is worth an estimated $26 million, all while chairing the subcommittee that oversees the SEC, the agency that polices Wall Street.
FEC records show executives at Palantir — which ICE is paying to build its deportation-tracking system — have put $117,250 into Susan Collins's campaign, her leadership PAC and the super PAC re-electing her, including $100,000 from CEO Alex Karp. Executives at the private prison giants CoreCivic and GEO Group gave too. Collins voted for nearly $70 billion for ICE and the Border Patrol and against body cameras.
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Mario Diaz-Balart is a powerful leader on the House Appropriations Committee, where he personally controls the billions of dollars that fund U.S. foreign policy and defense.
At this week's debate, Susan Collins answered a question about being out of touch by recalling a year without health insurance. Within weeks of that 1994 loss she was running a center funded by Bushmaster's owner, a donor. A decade later she voted for the law that shields gunmakers from lawsuits — a law he had pushed hard for.
Kennedy's FDA sold its August food-ingredient rule as closing a loophole. Tucked inside it is a change that would let companies put low-dose chemicals directly into food after only an abbreviated review — the same shortcut that put more rocket-fuel chemical in baby cereal.
V-PAC, the $42 million super PAC funded mostly by billionaires to elect Vivek Ramaswamy, mailed Ohio voters a flyer whose lead claim about Amy Acton is false. Its spokesman called it a 'typo.'
Fairshake, the super PAC funded mainly by Coinbase, a16z and Ripple, is backing 19 House Republicans — $1 million apiece for French Hill, Bryan Steil and Bill Huizenga, the sponsor and two cosponsors of the industry's top bill. All 19 voted for it.
