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| - The figure cited by Kennedy referred to the industry in which individual donors were employed. It did not refer to funds originating from, or directed by, pharmaceutical companies.
On Jan. 30, 2025, during the second day of his Senate confirmation hearings, health and human services secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. implied that Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders had accepted "millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry," whose donations were intended to protect the industry's interests.
Below is a condensed transcript of that exchange, in which Kennedy and Sanders spoke over each other and repeated themselves:
KENNEDY: Bernie, the problem of corruption is not just in the federal agencies; it's in Congress too. Almost all the members of this panel … including yourself, are accepting millions of dollars from the pharmaceutical industry and protecting their interests.
SANDERS: I ran for president like you. I got millions and millions of contributions. They did not come from the executives. Not one nickel of PAC money from the pharmaceutical [industry]. They came from workers.
KENNEDY: In 2020, you were the single largest receiver of pharmaceutical money.
SANDERS: Because I had small contributions from workers from all over this country. Workers. Not a nickel from corporate PACs. … They came from workers.
This talking point comes from an analysis of Federal Election Commission data done by the nonprofit political donation tracker Open Secrets, but it was a misuse of that analysis. Sanders pushed back on X (archived) the next day:
Corporations themselves cannot donate directly to federal candidates, but they can make donations through corporate PACs. The owners of companies and their employees also can make individual donations. For donations that exceed $200, campaigns are generally required to ask for information about the industry in which the contributor works, and they are required to disclose that information if provided.
From that official data, Open Secrets determines the industries in which a candidate's donors worked based on its own methodology. Open Secrets explains that:
It is impossible to know either the economic interest that made each individual contribution possible or the motivation for each individual giver. However, the patterns of contributions provide critical information for voters, researchers and others. That is why Congress and many states have mandated that candidates, political parties and political committees request employer information from contributors and publicly report it when the contributor provides it.
In some cases, a cluster of contributions from people associated with the same organization may indicate a concerted effort by that organization to "bundle" contributions to the candidate. In other cases, the reason for the contributions may be completely unrelated to the organization.
In the 2019-20 Congressional funding cycle, Sanders received more money from people employed in the field classified by Open Secrets as "pharmaceuticals/health products" ($1.4 million) than any other member of Congress. He also received roughly $400,000 from people employed in "pharmaceutical manufacturing."
This does not mean he received nearly $2 million from "the pharmaceutical industry," — it means the money was from people employed, in any capacity, in that field.
For his presidential campaign in 2020, Sanders pledged "to not knowingly accept any contributions over $200 from the PACs, lobbyists, or executives of health insurance or pharmaceutical companies," while noting that "The pledge does not apply to rank-and-file workers employed by pharmaceutical giants and health insurance companies."
According to Open Secrets, 70% of the money raised by Sanders from 2015 to 2020 originated from small individual donors contributing less than $200. Multiple analyses of his 2020 donations have suggested that the people giving to that campaign were not executives.
The only way a corporation could directly give to Sanders would be through a political action committee, or PAC. Open Secrets data shows he received no corporate PAC money.
The donations tallied by Open Secrets and cited by Kennedy almost exclusively come from rank-and-file workers. To characterize this grouping of data as an industry donation is misleading, according to Open Secrets itself, as it explained in a Jan. 31, 2025 post (archived) on X:
There's a lot of chatter about donations to Bernie Sanders' 2020 presidential campaign from the pharmaceutical industry. To be clear, our data on industry giving rolls up contributions from individuals who work in that industry and PACs. Corporation cannot donate to campaigns.
In the 2020 Congressional fundraising cycle, Bernie Sanders was also the top recipient of donors employed in 66 other industry classifications ranging from accounting to waste management to marijuana.
Because the totals referenced by Kennedy do not refer to direct contributions from corporate PACs associated with the pharmaceutical industry or to large donations made by those companies' executives or owners, the claim that Sanders received "millions from the pharmaceutical industry" in 2020 is false.
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