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In the era of billion-dollar presidential campaigns and political groups that can raise donations in unlimited amounts from almost any source, we are used to reading stories about the large amounts of money that special interests invest in politics. But what do they get out of the government they spend so much trying to influence by supporting political campaigns and parties or hiring well-connected lobbyists?
Bill Allison and Sarah Harkins set out to answer that question, compiling huge amounts of data from multiple federal sources, identifying the biggest corporate political donors over a six year period, and then compiling numbers on the various federal support -- contracts, grants, loans, loan guarantees and various programs adopted in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis -- to attempt to show what the biggest donors get from the federal government.