In this week's newsletter: What started as a simple profile of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's political finances revealed a fundraising model and war chest that could position her for a run for Senate, and perhaps even president. Plus, we break down pharmaceutical manufacturers' massive lobbying enterprise in the wake of President Donald Trump's move to ban direct-to-consumer pharma ads on TV. |
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Congressional profile: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez |
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) outraised all of her House colleagues in the first half of 2025. Her campaign raised a whopping $15.4 million and had $9.8 million on hand at the end of June.
Such a major haul could be an indication of ambition for higher office, and Axios reported that Ocasio-Cortez and her team are positioning her to run for president or a Senate seat in 2028, Hien An Ngo reports.
Ocasio-Cortez fueled donations to her campaign as she toured the nation with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on their “Fight Oligarchy” tour. The two have energized people dismayed by Democrats’ performance during the 2024 election, and they are leading some of the party’s most energetic pushback to President Donald Trump’s administration.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D), a fellow New Yorker, has come under criticism by members of his own party for not taking a stronger stand against Trump, giving rise to speculation that Ocasio-Cortez may challenge him in 2028.
Easily one of the most high-profile and polarizing figures in her party, Ocasio-Cortez has been outspoken about her progressive priorities, including Medicare for all, free public college tuition and housing as a human right. Over the course of her tenure, Ocasio-Cortez has become more accepted as part of the team, rather than an insurgent. She was selected to serve as vice ranking member of the House Oversight Committee in 2023, but two years later she was defeated for the committee’s top minority position by a more senior lawmaker.
Ocasio-Cortez has championed a number of anti-corruption bills. Working with bipartisan cosponsors, she introduced the Bipartisan Restoring Faith in Government Act this year. The bill would prohibit members of Congress and their families from owning and trading individual stocks. She has since endorsed the Restore Trust in Congress Act, another bipartisan bill to ban stock trading by members of Congress and their families.
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In the first quarter of 2025, Ocasio-Cortez raised a record-breaking $9.6 million, more than double her previous-highest quarter and more than any of her colleagues brought in that quarter. Donations spiked after the start of her tour with Sanders began at the end of February. In her second quarter, her campaign received $5.6 million, putting her third in order of most dollars received by candidates that quarter.
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Individual donors contributed on average about $20 to her 2026 campaign. Since her 2020 race, her first as an incumbent, Ocasio-Cortez has consistently ranked in the top three incumbents with the largest proportion of donations coming from small individual donors. At least two thirds of her donations came from small donors in the past three election cycles. Candidates like Ocasio-Cartez who campaign on rejecting corporate political action committees’ and lobbyists’ money often have high shares of individual contributions, as do candidates who are high-profile like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.), who ranked first in 2024. That year, only about 27.6 percent of the dollars donated to members of Congress came from individual small donors, compared to 69.9 percent of Ocasio-Cortez’s.
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During the 2024 cycle, only 0.3 percent of the funds her campaign raised came from political action committees. About three quarters of the $40,332 that came from PACs were from labor unions and the rest came from ideological or single-issue organizations. For example, her 2024 campaign received $1,000 from the Sierra Club, an environmental advocacy group that supports clean energy. Ocasio-Cortez joined the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2025.
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Since her first campaign, Ocasio-Cortez has received no money from corporate PACs. Ocasio-Cortez has consistently rejected contributions from lobbyists as a matter of policy. However, in a small number of instances, contributions from lobbyists who weren’t clearly labeled as such slipped through. In those cases, the campaign has issued refunds once notified.
- The congresswoman owns no individual stocks, according to her 2024 financial disclosure report. She reported between $17,000 to $81,000 in gross assets and $15,001 to $50,000 in student loans.
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Chris Wright, energy secretary
- Tom Homan, border czar
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Steve Witkoff, special envoy to the Middle East
- Mike Huckabee, ambassador to Israel
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Lori Chavez-DeRemer, secretary of labor
- J.D. Vance, vice president
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Chuck Schumer, Senate minority leader
- John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA
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Doug Collins, secretary of veterans affairs
- Hakeem Jeffries, House minority leader
- Lee Zeldin, EPA administrator
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Howard Lutnick, secretary of commerce
- Mike Waltz, national security advisor
- Marco Rubio, secretary of state
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Sean Duffy, secretary of transportation
- Susie Wiles, White House chief of staff
- Tulsi Gabbard, director national intelligence
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Kash Patel, director of the FBI
- Kristi Noem, secretary of homeland security
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services
- Linda McMahon, secretary of education
- Elise Stefanik, ambassador to the United Nations
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Doug Burgum, secretary of the interior
- Pete Hegseth, secretary of defense
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Pam Bondi, attorney general
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Trump moves against direct-to-consumer drug ads despite massive pharma lobbying |
President Donald Trump has begun a sweeping crackdown on direct-to-consumer drug advertising as part of his administration’s Make America Healthy Again campaign, which could alter the way the U.S. pharmaceutical industry markets products to consumers. This policy shift comes against the backdrop of more than $102 million in lobbying on pharmaceutical manufacturing in the first six months of 2025, Carolyn Neugarten reports, making the drug industry one of the most powerful lobbying forces in the country.
On Sept. 9, Trump signed a memorandum that delivered on Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s long-running campaign against the perceived “pipeline of deception” of direct-to-consumer drug advertising. Kennedy has been pushing to end the “adequate provision” loophole in the Food and Drug Modernization Act; this loophole allows drug companies to avoid listing all side effects in commercials as long as they direct viewers to another source, like a website or phone number. The rule, adopted in 1997, paved the way for today’s fast-paced and cheery ads that often confine side effects to a few seconds of fine print.
Today, pharmaceutical companies spend more than $10 billion a year on direct-to-consumer advertising, with the U.S. and New Zealand being the only countries that permit it. |
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In the 2024 election cycle alone, the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry spent $151 million on federal lobbying, activity involving 139 companies deploying 738 lobbyists. Close to two-thirds of these pharmaceutical lobbyists have gone through the “revolving door,” meaning they are former government employees or elected officials who pivoted to positions as lobbyists, consultants, and strategists for private companies.
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The industry’s main trade association, Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, is consistently among the top spenders in Washington. In the first quarter of 2025 alone, PhRMA logged its highest-ever quarterly spending at nearly $13 million. Major firms like Pfizer, Merck, and Eli Lilly also poured millions into lobbying efforts, even as some faced cease-and-desist orders over their TV advertising practices. Overall, pharmaceutical and health product companies spent $388.21 million on lobbying in 2024, and in just the first half of 2025, they have already spent $226.78 million.
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On the campaign side, drug manufacturers have spread money across party lines, but clear partisan patterns emerge. Pfizer’s political action committees and employees gave $2.8 million, split $1.6 million to Democrats and $1.1 million to Republicans. Merck followed, giving more than $2 million in 2024, with $1.5 million going to Democrats and $728,000 to Republicans. Eli Lilly, generally Republican-leaning, split its contributions more evenly between the two parties. Overall, most multinational pharmaceutical giants, including Novo Nordisk, Bristol-Myers Squibb, AstraZeneca, Novartis, and Takeda, tend to tilt Democratic, especially in the past two presidential elections.
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See our media citations from outlets around the nation this week: |
Donald Trump’s Big Pharma Showdown Ends with a Whimper (The New Yorker)
Between 1998 and the middle of this year, according to data from OpenSecrets, a public-interest group that tracks money in politics, Big Pharma spent more than $6.3 billion on lobbying. During that period, the most significant reform related to drug pricing came in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which empowered Medicare to haggle prices with drug companies. |
New Report Examines Fossil Fuel Ties of Dozens of Trump Administration Hires (Inside Climate News)
The oil and gas industry spent more than $70 million lobbying the federal government in the first half of 2025, according to data from the nonprofit organization OpenSecrets. That puts the industry slightly below the pace of its spending in 2024, which multiple watchdog groups described as evidence that the industry hasn’t had to lobby the government as intensely as in past years to secure key wins. |
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