DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Now a story about money and influence. A Washington-based nonprofit that promotes open government has devised a new way to gauge the power of corporations. Here's NPR's Peter Overby.
PETER OVERBY, BYLINE: The Sunlight Foundation took the 200 corporations most active in Washington, and it applied several metrics - what the companies got in federal contracts and other federal support, what they spent on lobbying, how much their executives and political action committees gave in campaign contributions. The analysis covers the years 2007 to 2012.
BILL ALLISON: In Congress and the executive branch, there aren't permanent majorities governing. There aren't permanent alignments. But there really are permanent interests in Washington.
OVERBY: This is Bill Allison, the Sunlight Foundation's editorial director. He says that with some companies, a policy of giving big to political campaigns seems pretty obvious.
ALLISON: With some other companies, maybe not as obvious, but federal spending is a big part of their business model.
OVERBY: He says, the top 200 corporations accounted for nearly $6 billion in lobbying and campaign contributions. Those same corporations benefited from more than $4 trillion in federal contracts and assistance. This year alone, the Pentagon has budgeted to spend a $163 billion on procurement, research and development. So military contractors lead the list of contract recipients, and they hover in the upper ranks of companies with the biggest campaign contributions.
The other dominant corporate sector is finance. Some of the country's biggest financial institutions - Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and others - are the top recipients of federal aid. That's because it cost so much to rescue the financial sector after the 2008 market crash. Last week, Congress came back for its lame-duck session, and the fundraising business resumed after a short hiatus.
ALLISON: We're just through an election season, and everybody is probably sick to death of thinking about elections.
OVERBY: But Bill Allison says, some corporate PACs are gearing up for prime time.
ALLISON: A lot of times with these interests, they are less interested in an election than they are in, you know, governance and what's happening on Capitol Hill.
OVERBY: And that's another metric in the analysis - how much campaign money went to incumbents? Some corporate strategists are risk-averse - Honeywell International, for example, where incumbents got 88 percent of the contributions. A statement from Honeywell says that its PAC, quote, "supports those who support the policies that are most important to our business," unquote. All of this might imply that donors are the driving force on Capitol Hill. David Primo doubts that. He's a professor of political science and business administration at the University of Rochester.
DAVID PRIMO: The conventional wisdom out there is that businesses are going to Washington, writing checks and expecting big returns. But the other side of the story is that members of Congress may implicitly threaten businesses that if they don't change their policy, or if they are not heavily involved in the political process, that bad things might happen to them.
OVERBY: Which doesn't make the process anymore sparkling clean, but it does point the accusing finger in a different direction. Primo adds this...
PRIMO: By and large, the political science research hasn't found that money and politics drives policy outcomes. The research is more mixed on exactly what it is that money's doing.
OVERBY: The situation about it is murky as Washington itself. Peter Overby, NPR News, Washington.
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