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Campaign Funding ‘26
In Ohio today, Republican candidate for governor Vivek Ramaswamy launched a $10 million TV and digital ad campaign to run until Election Day. Jeremy Pelzer of Cleveland DOT com explained that this ad buy alone is more than twice as much as the $4.4 million Democratic candidate Amy Acton, the former state health director, has raised, and it is only about half of the $19.5 million Ramaswamy’s campaign has raised.
Forbes reported in December 2025 that Ramaswamy’s net worth had nearly doubled, from about $1 billion to about $1.8 billion, since he announced his candidacy in February 2025.
On March 9, Mike Baker and Steven Rich of the New York Times published a long exposé of the corruption of American politics by billionaires. They explain how underwriting political campaigns from those for local school boards to the presidency has enabled the very wealthy to lock in their policy preferences for tax cuts, deregulation, and cuts to the social safety net while also steering valuable government contracts to themselves.
In 2024, Baker and Rich note, 300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated 19% of all political contributions in federal elections, either directly or through political action committees (PACs). While that amount does not account for money that might have gone through dark money groups that don’t have to disclose their donors, it still amounts to more than $3 billion, or an average of $10 million per family.
The authors’ example of what this flood of money looks like in the political system is the victory of Senator Tim Sheehy (R-MT), who beat popular Democratic incumbent Jon Tester in 2024 with the help of $8 million from billionaire Stephen Schwarzman and at least 63 other billionaires and 37 of their immediate family members, who donated about $47 million to Sheehy’s Senate race.
In the Senate, Sheehy “has become a key ally on tax policies that benefit the wealthy and cosponsored a proposal to eliminate the estate tax,” the authors note. Sheehy has been in the news lately for killing a decades-old solar energy tax credit when his own home uses solar power. Sheehy’s spokesperson declined to tell reporters if he had used the tax credit for 26% of the system’s cost.
Sheehy has also been in the news for jumping into the effort of three Capitol Police officers to eject a protester opposed to the Iran War from a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing. The arm of Brian McGinnis, a Marine Corps veteran who was wearing his dress uniform, was stuck behind the door. As Sheehy threw his weight into McGinnis, there was the audible crack of his arm breaking. When a spectator called Sheehy a coward, the senator appeared to tell him: “Go f*ck yourself.” Sheehy later said he was trying to “de-escalate the situation” and blamed McGinnis for “causing…violence.”
Billionaire Elon Musk spent close to $300 million in the 2024 elections, putting much of it, as well as the support of the social media platform X, behind Trump. After his leadership of the Department of Government Efficiency created a backlash to his companies and sparked a rift between him and Trump, Musk said he was going to step back from political spending.
And yet by the end of 2025, he had already given $20 million to Republicans to prepare for the 2026 elections. “It’s a big deal for Trump and for the Republicans to have the world’s richest man on their side,” Republican strategist Brian Seitchik told Julia Mueller and Julia Shapero of The Hill in February.
Baker and Rich noted that while both parties had reaped windfalls from billionaires in the past, in 2024 that money turned sharply toward Republicans. For every dollar of billionaire money that went to Democrats, they wrote, five dollars went to Republicans.
During his term, President Joe Biden called for securing the solvency of Social Security and Medicare and addressing the growing national debt with higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations. He wanted to increase the tax rate for those making more than $400,000 a year, to close the carried-interest loophole, and to impose a tax of 25% on Americans with a wealth of more than $100 million, saying during his 2024 State of the Union address: “No billionaire should pay a lower tax rate than a teacher, a sanitation worker, a nurse.” When she took over as the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris also called for higher taxes on the wealthy, although at slightly lower rates than Biden backed.
In contrast, Trump promised billionaires he would extend the 2017 tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and corporations. At a fund raiser at Mar-a-Lago, he told oil executives that they should raise $1 billion to put him back in office. That price tag would be a “deal,” he told them, because of the taxes and regulations they would avoid if he were in charge.
And so, some of them pumped money into his campaign. Once back in office, Trump gave his wealthy supporters what he promised: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that extended the 2017 tax cuts, cut regulation, and slashed the social safety net.
But along with those tax cuts and deregulation, those who supported Trump gave the country an erratic president who has destabilized the world economy through tariffs and now has led us into war in the Middle East.
Today Paul Krugman wrote in his newsletter that this is “The Billionaires’ War,” since it was their campaign money that mobilized low-information voters to rally behind Trump and his minions: “The Gang That Couldn’t Think Straight,” as Krugman puts it.
There are major societal implications for that war. It is already costing at least $1 billion a day, and administration officials have suggested they are going to ask Congress for more money for it. That request will come on top of the news of March 10 that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. has borrowed $1 trillion over the past five months—that’s $50 billion a week on average—as Trump’s tax cuts slash revenue.
Republicans are sounding the alarm about the ballooning debt and suggesting the only way to address it is to cut more programs that benefit the American people. But that raises fundamental questions about the purpose of the U.S. government. What should it do? Whom should it benefit, and why?
In the 1860s, during the U.S. Civil War, the Republican Party reacted to rising expenses and growing debt not by punishing everyday Americans, but by inventing the income tax. In a time when the very existence of the American government was under threat, Republicans argued that the federal government had a right to “demand” 99 percent of a man’s property for an urgent necessity. When the nation required it, Vermont’s Justin Smith Morrill said, “the property of the people…belongs to the Government.”
From the beginning, congressmen graduated the taxes according to income. Morrill said: “The weight [of taxation] must be distributed equally not upon each man an equal amount, but a tax proportionate to his ability to pay.”
Recognizing that those who supported the government financially would care deeply about its survival, the American people welcomed the taxes. Even conservative Republican newspapers declared, “There is not the slightest objection raised in any loyal quarter to as much taxation as may be necessary.”
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Notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/09/us/billionaires-federal-election-campaign-contributions.html
https://dailymontanan.com/2026/03/12/montana-sent-a-senator-to-washington-not-a-bouncer/
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5727198-musk-political-fray-big-2026-midterm-donations/
https://taxfoundation.org/research/all/federal/kamala-harris-tax-plan-2024/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/09/trump-oil-industry-campaign-money/
Paul Krugmanhttps://fortune.com/2026/03/10/treasury-debt-borrowing-five-months-deficit-warning/
https://www.cbo.gov/system/files/2026-03/61978-MBR.pdf
Justin Smith Morrill, Congressional Globe, 37th Cong., 2nd Sess., p. 1194.
Philadelphia Daily Evening Bulletin, March 14, 1862.
X:
"The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up." - SW
Ogden, UT, USA
Comments
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Reich, 15 March:
That war is costing the U.S. about $1 billion a day. The Pentagon’s budget is around $1 trillion this year, and Trump wants an additional $500 billion. Because of the war, the cost of oil has topped $100 a barrel, and the price of a gallon of gas at the U.S. pump now averages $3.67 — up from $2.92before the war.
The strain on the federal budget has given Republicans an excuse to demand further cuts in federal assistance to people in need. JD Vance recently kicked off a “war on waste and fraud” by announcing suspension of Medicaid payments to Minnesota, charging that the program is rife with fraud perpetrated by “bad actors in our society … [who] decide to make themselves rich.”
But if you want to find real waste and fraud, look no further than Pete Hegseth’s “Department of War.”
A new analysis by government watchdog Open the Books found that as the 2025 fiscal year was ending, Hegseth’s Pentagon spent: nearly $100,000 on a Steinway grand piano to outfit the home of the Air Force chief of staff; $60,719 on premium office furniture, including at least one luxurious $1,844 Aeron Chair; $12,540 for three-tiered fruit basket stands; $2 million on Alaskan king crab, $6.9 million on lobster tail, $15.1 million on ribeye steak, and $1 million on salmon; $124,000 for ice cream machines; and $26,000 for sushi preparation tables.
The Pentagon has failed every audit since it was legally required to start submitting them in 2018, and reports say it will continue to fail them at least through 2028.
The ballooning profits of military contractors are helped by their near monopoly on defense production. Since the 1990s, the number of prime contractors for the Defense Department has shrunk from 55 to five.
Keep following the money.
These giants have been spending more on enriching their investors than expanding production. Between 2020 and 2025, top military contractors devoted $110 billion to stock buybacks and dividends — more than double what they spent on capital expenditures — which boosted their stock values and the pay packages of their CEOs.
And who are their biggest investors and CEOs? Trump loyalists.
Larry Ellison’s Oracle provides Hegseth’s war machine with cloud infrastructure and enterprise software. (Reminder: Ellison is the second-richest person in America and a Trump loyalist on the verge of owning a media empire comprised of CBS, CNN, TikTok, Comedy Central, and HBO.)
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has secured billions in contracts for launching sensitive satellites and space surveillance. Musk’s xAI has received a Pentagon contract to develop advanced AI tools. (Reminder: Musk is the richest person in the world and spent a quarter of a billion dollars getting Trump reelected in 2024.)
Peter Thiel’s Palantir Technologies has landed multibillion-dollar defense contracts, including a $10 billion agreement with the U.S. Army to provide AI-driven data analytics and software to integrate AI, surveillance, and battlefield management systems. (Reminder: Thiel is a billionaire who contributed $1.25 million to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, including $1 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, and then $10 million to getting JD Vance elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022.)
Not to forget Big Oil, now enjoying windfall profits as global oil prices soar. (Recall Trump asking oil company executives for $1 billion for his 2024 campaign, in return for undisclosed favors.)
Among others benefitting from the turmoil is Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and one of the U.S. government’s chief negotiators in the Middle East, who’s busily raising at least $5 billion or more for his private-equity investment firm from governments in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund.
Finally, there’s Trump’s on-again, off-again ally Vladimir Putin. In just two weeks of war, Russia has reaped an estimated $6.9 billion from the increase in oil prices and the easing of sanctions.
What to do? At the very least, Congress should:
Prohibit defense contractors from making campaign donations or lobbying Congress. Why should taxpayers subsidize these activities?
Tax windfall profits from Trump’s war (or from any war). America has had windfall profits taxes during wartime before. Given the size of current windfalls, we need it again.
Cut the defense budget. Start by cutting it 10 percent each year it fails audits. This is particularly important during the Trump-Hegseth era of defense bloat.
As long as Trump and his Republicans control Congress and the executive branch, these reforms don’t have a prayer. Still, Democrats should introduce them and push for them. Let Trump and his Republicans go on record voting against them.
"The sooner you fall behind, the more time you'll have to catch up." - SW
Ogden, UT, USA
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