Just before 7 a.m. on Thursday, House Republicans narrowly passed a “megabill” stuffed with items in their domestic policy agenda, extending the GOP’s 2017 tax cuts weighted toward the wealthiest while slashing spending on Medicaid and food stamps. Over the next few weeks, the Senate plans to revise the multitrillion-dollar legislation and volley it back to the House, which can then approve the changes and send it to President Trump’s desk, or hammer out tweaks with the Senate. Majority Leader John Thune may have only one Republican vote to spare to pass the bill, if Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and Sen. Ron Johnson (Wis.) end up disapproving of the tax-and-spending package.
Billionaire campaign donors to Republicans are set to reap the benefits from the reconciliation bill’s tax provisions, which would lock in many of the cuts from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed by President Trump.
This week, an analysis by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that the reconciliation bill passed by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Republicans would reduce the household resources of Americans who make the least, while padding the resources of those who make the most.
Senate Republicans have floated a few areas of ostensible concern about the House-passed bill, but enshrining tax cuts for the wealthiest was not among them—rather, Thune’s caucus is planning to use a controversial accounting method to help make the tax cuts permanent.
"The world's wealthiest families have spent record amounts supporting GOP candidates to secure massive tax breaks and deregulation. In response, Trump and his allies in Congress are offering them returns on this investment through a $5 trillion tax bill—one that provides generous tax giveaways to wealthy elites while cutting vital services like healthcare, education, and nutritional support, thereby skyrocketing the deficit," said David Kass, executive director of the coalition Americans for Tax Fairness.
"It's hardly surprising that the billionaire-backed GOP would pursue a tax bill that represents the largest wealth transfer from bottom to top,” Kass of ATF told Sludge. “We cannot let billionaires continue to erode our democracy. Working- and middle-class Americans must fight back—our democracy is not for sale."
To influence elections, wealthy donors can make donations of unlimited size to outside spending groups like super PACs, targeting voters with messages and blanketing the airwaves with ads. Such spending skyrocketed in the 2024 election cycle, according to OpenSecrets, totaling nearly $4.5 billion, compared with almost $3 billion 2020’s cycle.
OpenSecrets compiled a list of the top 100 donors making federal contributions in the 2024 cycle to PACs, parties, and other groups. These 100 biggest donors gave more than three times as much favoring Republicans at the federal level last cycle: more than $1.7 billion to Republicans and $526 million to Democrats, according to a Sludge review of the figures. Most of the top 25 donors, like Elon Musk, reclusive banking heir Timothy Mellon, and Miriam Adelson, gave to Republican groups.
At the presidential level, wealthy megadonors powered Trump’s run for re-election: 10 donors provided about 44% of all funding backing Trump, OpenSecrets found. Almost all of Trump’s top 10 super PAC and campaign backers were billionaires many times over, or in Mellon’s case, from a billionaire family.
For Tax Day this year, ATF updated its analysis of how much billionaires’ fortunes have soared under the Trump-GOP tax law, known as the TCJA, which was passed by former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Overall, billionaires in the U.S. grew their wealth by 125% since it was signed into law, ATF calculated—but Elon Musk was particularly enriched under the tax rules, jumping from around $20 billion net worth at the end of 2017 to almost $348 billion as of the end of March.
