Corporate donors to President George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns have seen direct benefits from their donations, with election funds buying changes in policy. Some 200 of the President’s largest contributors and lobbyists have benefited from administration policy and dozens more are expected to benefit as other laws go through Congress. Some of the large industries and corporate donors benefiting from administration policy include:

• MBNA spent nearly $20 million on lobbying for bankruptcy reform between 1998 and 2004. During the 2000 election, MBNA’s employees gave the Bush campaign $200,000 in contributions and allowed the campaign to use an MBNA corporate jet. In 2004, former MBNA CEO Charles Cawley and Vice Chairman Lance Loring Weaver each raised $200,000 for the Bush campaign. Last year, MBNA became the largest corporate patron of Bush’s political career. The 500 page bankruptcy reform bill that passed Congress was initially drafted by a lobbyist for the financial services industry.
• Timber companies now pay lower tax rates on logging sales and face fewer barriers to logging in national forests because of administrative changes and laws Mr. Bush signed.
• Energy producers avoided potential legal fees and cleanup costs after the Bush administration revised clean-air standards.
• Mining executives who tapped new veins of coal, thanks to administrative rule changes that opened swaths of hills and forests to their backhoes and left once-protected streams vulnerable to pollution.
• Heads of stock brokerages and other multinational firms, which, under a special tax incentive in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, are bringing hundreds of millions of dollars they earned or stored abroad back into the United States this year at reduced rates.
• Oregon-based Pacific Seafood Group used a lobbying group run by two of Bush’s “Pioneer” fundraisers, Gallatin Group, to win changes in laws restricting the fishing of certain types of fish, thus helping Pacific increase its $700 million in annual profits. Furthermore, the Bush administration has proposed an overhaul of the country’s fisheries management law, with the overhaul containing some provisions taken word-for-word from a proposal drafted by seafood processors for their own benefit.
• The Bush administration has also supported efforts shielding corporations from lawsuits. These measures include the HEALTH Act of 2003 that would cap some pain-and-suffering jury awards at $250,000, a measure that would protect makers of bird flu drugs by requiring any lawsuits against them to show “willful misconduct” instead of negligence, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act which provides immunity to gun makers in lawsuits holding them responsible for deaths, the Asbestos Trust Fund Bill that would establish a fund to reimburse those suffering from asbestos exposure and halt litigation, and the Class Action Fairness Act that moves most class action suits to the federal courts.
• Other companies hoping to benefit include Wall Street traders banking on a 2003 dividend tax cut to boost stock prices, doctors seeking caps on their lawsuit liability, pharmaceutical executives waiting for a new federal prescription drug plan to kick millions of dollars their way, and the wife of the chairman of the Hallmark greeting-card company, which is lobbying to slow the increase in postage rates.

President Bush’s campaign funding network is made up of a variety of corporate executives and elites with the majority based in Florida and Texas. Since taking office in 2001, the Bush administration has rewarded his Texas-based donors with more than $3 billion in federal government contracts.