Some of our most devoted readers have struggled to understand what we at the Revolving Door Project mean when we discuss issues of corporate power, even up to the point of insisting that it “doesn’t mean anything.” To help such individuals better grasp our shared reality, we thought it would be helpful to provide some quantitative measures that help us understand the expansion of corporate power in America. We hope these measures will help our readers understand our controversial premise (corporate power has grown immensely in the United States), even while we recommend they supplement their examination of corporate power through the use of qualitative measures (particularly useful for understanding Trump’s corruption — at least until we get a thorough criminal investigation of his criminality).
While it is convenient for critics of “corporate power” to deride the term as impossible-to-define sloganeering, we see it differently. America’s big corporations and the oligarch class that controls them are ravenously greedy. Contrary to Gordon Gekko, we assert that this greed is not good, and it is the duty of the government of the United States to protect its citizens from this all-consuming drive for more. To us, corporate power can best be described as the extent to which existing large firms and their billionaire owners are able to pursue this greed at the expense of everyday people. The more safeguards and countervailing forces in place to curb the worst practices of these firms, the less power they have. Conversely, the freer large corporations are to run roughshod over the American populace in their pursuit of ever greater wealth, the greater is corporate power.
Income and Wealth Disparities
Wealth and income inequality are evidence of the increasing corporate power in today’s America. Here’s some good, easy measures on this issue.
The American Prospect: A New Low for American Workers
The percentage of GDP that went to labor in 2025 hit the lowest rate since the measure was invented in 1947.
EPI: CEO pay increased in 2024 and is now 281 times that of the typical worker
In 1978 CEOs earned roughly 31 times the salary of a typical worker. In 2024, they earned 281 times that of a typical worker.
ITEP: Corporate Taxes Before and After the Trump Tax Law
After Trump’s 2018 tax cut, the effective corporate tax rate fell nearly 10% from 22% to 12.8%, and “The number of these corporations paying tax rates of less than 10 percent increased from 56 to 95 after the Trump tax law went into effect.”
UC Berkeley: The ultra-rich are different from you and me. Their tax rates are lower.
For the top 0.0002% or earners in the country (roughly 400 individuals) the effective tax rate fell from 30% in 2017, to a mere 23% in 2020.
Inequality.org: Billionaire Wealth Concentration Is Even Worse than You Imagine
“The share of the U.S. wealth pie owned by the top 0.1 percent grew 59.6 percent from 1989 to 2024, according to an Institute for Policy Studies analysis of Federal Reserve data, while the share of the U.S. wealth pie owned by the bottom 50 percent of households has declined 26.1 percent, adjusted for inflation.”
Professional Background of Executive Branch Appointees
As the Revolving Door Project, we believe the background of individuals staffing the most powerful roles in government is extremely important in dictating policy implementation. When corporate executives are the ones entrusted with reining in corporate malfeasance, corporate power is better entrenched. When public servants, experienced regulators or other figures are entrusted with government power, corporations are disempowered. We know some of our readers have struggled to understand the nuances in the past, so here’s a helpful explainer for those who are still confused by a concept the average American seems to understand just fine. This metric also allows for an easy comparison across presidential administrations for those seeking to understand how elections influence corporate power.
Here are a few resources that can help you understand how corporate power is shaping the current administration:
Appointees in the current administration have countless conflicts of interest between the companies they are tasked with overseeing and their previous employers.
Public Citizen and Revolving Door Project: Trump’s Polluter Playground
An analysis of 111 Trump appointees with power over environmental and energy policy found:
“43 former fossil fuel industry employees, 29 former corporate executives, 14 former corporate lawyers, 12 people tied to fossil fuel-funded right-wing think tanks, 7 people tied primarily to Republican politics such as elected officials and staffers pushing fossil fuel interests, 6 from utility companies or the nuclear energy industry”
Revolving Door Project: How Crypto Is Buying DC One Revolver At A Time
A tracker of former government officials hired by the crypto industry, and the current officials who used to work for crypto.
Revolving Door Project: Tracking Oligarchs in Trump World
The Trump administration has 13 billionaires serving in appointed positions and far more working with the administration to shape policy behind the scenes.
Corporate Lobbying
One of the easiest ways to measure corporate influence is through actual lobbying by corporations.
Open Secrets: Federal lobbying set new record in 2024
Lobbying disclosures offer an easy way to track corporate power with quantifiable numbers. 2024 saw an all time high.
Academic Research On The Growth Of Lobbying
Countless academic articles and books have been published on the growth of lobbying since the 1960s, providing us with a clear picture of what a more assertive corporate world looks like, and helping us understand how corporations helped build their power at the state level and nationally.
As Lee Drutman explained in 2020, discussing the trajectory since Reagan’s victory:
“Over the past four decades, large corporations have learned to play the Washington game. Companies now devote massive resources to politics, and their large-scale involvement increasingly redirects and constricts the capacities of the political system. The consequence is a democracy that is increasingly unable to tackle large-scale problems, and a political economy that too often rewards lobbying over innovation.”
Many experts date the “Empire Strikes Back” nature of the corporate political resurgence earlier, to the 1970s; Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s Winner-Take-All Politics is perhaps the clearest distillation of the history of corporate America’s resurgent dominance in our politics. For much cultural color on how this heel turn went down, we recommend Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980.
Campaign Expenditures
Politicians are responsive to the people who fund their campaigns– and those who can threaten to fund the campaigns of their opponents. Tracking corporate spending on elections (or that of the oligarchic figures who control some of America’s largest corporations) helps us follow this closely. With the changes in campaign finance laws post-Citizens United, this field of corporate power has exploded, with total billionaire spending in presidential elections rising from a mere $16 million in 2008, to $2.4 billion in 2024. Similarly, corporate spending in midterm elections rose from $12.5 million in 2012 to $179 million in 2022.
Brennan Center: Dark Money Hit a Record High of $1.9 Billion in 2024 Federal Races
With dark money being impossible to trace, the specific corporations or individuals funding campaigns can be challenging to know, but that doesn’t mean these expenditures don’t help entrench corporate power.
In 2024 there was no industry more visibly vying for political power than the crypto industry, which spent well over $100 million on elections across the country. It worked.
Deregulation and Lack of White Collar Crime Enforcement
Corporate behemoths benefit from weak regulators and lax enforcement of corporate crime. In his book on this very issue, Jesse Eisinger avails himself of a phrase used by James Comey, The Chickenshit Club, to describe the federal prosecutors too scared to go after corporate America. While his book does a great job of dissecting the lack of appetite for making hard cases against corporate America, it appears as though Trump’s America is less chickenshit than it is brazenly corrupt.
TRAC: Federal Prosecution of White-Collar Crimes Receiving Less and Less Attention
In the first year of the Trump administration, prosecutions of white collar crime fell by more than 10% compared to the year before.
Bloomberg: Trump Oversees All-Time Low in White Collar Crime Enforcement
In the first Trump administration, the number of white collar defendants fell by 26% compared to the Obama administration and fines on corporations fell by 76%.
NBC: Trump’s pardons forgive financial crimes that came with hundreds of millions in punishments
In addition to forgoing prosecutions on white collar criminals, Donald Trump is reversing convictions and penalties already secured under other administrations to ensure zero accountability for white collar criminals.
Harvard: In Corporations We Trust: Ongoing Deregulation and Government Protections
“In 2016, before President Trump took office, the SEC filed 868 enforcement actions and recovered $4.08 billion in settlements. These figures declined to 754 enforcement actions and $3.78 billion in settlements in 2017. Enforcement actions against public companies in particular dropped by a third, from 92 actions in 2016 to just 62 in 2017. The first half of 2018 witnessed an even more precipitous decline in SEC enforcement actions. Compared to the same six-month period in 2017, enforcement actions against public companies have dropped by 66 percent, from 45 such actions to just 15. More importantly, recoveries against public companies over the same time period were down a stunning 93.5 percent.”
Corporate Compliance Insights: Regulatory Penalties Dropped in ’25, Led by Sharp US Decline
“Enforcement activity diverged sharply by region. Fines issued by North American regulators fell 58%, with US fines dropping 61%”
Brookings: Tracking regulatory changes in the second Trump administration
The Brookings Institution is attempting to track all of the Trump administration’s regulatory changes, which are almost all deregulatory.
“A New York Times analysis, based on research from Harvard Law School, Columbia Law School and other sources, counts nearly 100 environmental rules officially reversed, revoked or otherwise rolled back under Mr. Trump. More than a dozen other potential rollbacks remained in progress by the end but were not finalized by the end of the administration’s term.”
Unionization Rates
Unions represent one of the few ways for American workers to stand up to corporate America. A decline in unionization has empowered the worst employers in the country and eroded the ability for American workers to fight back against corporate power.
CEPR: Union Density Continues to Decline
Unionization rates have been falling for decades, recent years have been no exception.
Corporate Concentration
As markets have become more concentrated in the hands of just a few businesses, these businesses have greater power to dictate wages, prices and a host of other material conditions.
Open Markets Institute: Monopoly By The Numbers
A good breakdown of how different sectors have been captured by a tiny number of huge corporate behemoths able to dictate the rules of the game.
ILSR: Mapping Food Deserts and Grocery Consolidation
Failure to enforce antitrust rules has allowed for increased consolidation in the grocery sector, increasing prices and leading to food deserts.
Control of the Media
The media industry has been struggling for years. This has helped contribute to the concentration of media outlets into a few firms, and allowed for extremely wealthy individuals like Jeff Bezos, to purchase some of the most influential news outlets in the country to shift their bias towards their worldview.
Jeff Bezos dictates Washington Post opinion page must focus on “personal liberties and free markets”
How else should one of the world’s richest people kick off the start of the second Trump administration than by sending a letter to his highly influential newspaper staff telling them to be more corporate-friendly?
UNC: Bigger and Bigger They Grow
“The top 25 companies that own the most newspapers control the fate of nearly one-third of all papers, up from 20 percent in 2004. This included two-thirds of all dailies – 812 – and almost a fourth of all weeklies – 1,376. The largest company, New Media/GateHouse, owns 451 newspapers in 34 states.”
Vox: Sinclair’s takeover of local news, in one striking map
The pro-Trump news company Sinclair owns nearly 200 local television stations in 100 markets around the country.
It’s not just Musk buying Twitter. Pro-Trump billionaires have purchased TikTok in their effort to control America’s largest social media platforms.
NPR: CBS shifts to appease the right under new owner
The new billionaire owner of CBS news has shifted news coverage in the hopes of moving the needle in favor of Donald Trump and his pro-business ideological project.