Federal IT contractors spent big on Hillary in 2016 election
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect Donald Trump winning the 2016 presidential election.
Republican nominee Donald Trump may be the new president-elect, but federal IT contractors overwhelmingly put their money on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton to win the race.
Earlier this year, IDC Government Insights and FedScoop released rankings of government-IT revenues from both the top-25 IT providers selling to multiple industries, and the top-100 IT providers who earn more than half of their revenue from government. And political action committees and individuals associated with the top-10 companies of each of those groups have donated in overwhelming numbers to Clinton over her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump, a FedScoop analysis has shown.
[Read more: New top 100 rankings reveals which firms earn the most from federal IT spending]
Those associated with the top-10 highest-earning IT firms who get more than half their revenue from government donated about three-times more to Clinton than to Trump — $328,709 to $79,304 — according to Center for Responsive Politics data.
That difference jumps to more than 17-times that donated to Trump — $1.7 million versus a measly $98,080 — for PACs and individuals associated with the top 10 highest-earning enterprise IT companies who get the bulk of their business outside of federal agencies.
Individuals and PACs associated with Lockheed Martin gave $3.3 million in this election cycle, the most money overall out of the 20 companies — $117,187 of that to Clinton, $27,166 to Trump, and the rest to other candidates or congressional races. That’s the largest contribution Trump received from any company on either list.
SAIC was the one company of the 20 whose associated PACs and individuals gave more money to Trump — $1,910 compared to $655 for Clinton.
But to be sure, those donations seem like a drop in the proverbial bucket when compared to the donations from Microsoft-related PACs and individuals, who easily gave the most to Clinton of the 20 companies, with $711,675 in donations.
Here’s a breakdown of how each group of top 10 federal IT-earning companies donated:
Top 10 federally focused IT providers (in order of donations to this election cycle)
- Lockheed Martin – $3,324,958 overall spending
- Northrop Grumman – $2,726,102 overall spending
- Raytheon – $2,006,920 overall spending
- Harris Corp – $693,332 overall spending
- Leidos – $405,656 overall spending
- SAIC – $331,708 overall spending
- Battelle Memorial Institute – $4,569 overall spending
- Consolidated Nuclear Security – information not available
- National Security Technologies – information not available
- UChicago Argonne – information not available
Top 10 enterprise IT providers to government (in order of donations to this election cycle)
- Deloitte Consulting (information from Deloitte LLP) – $2,788,976 overall spending
- Boeing – $2,703,989 overall spending
- Microsoft – $2,498,598 overall spending
- Cisco – $872,659 overall spending
- IBM – $552,808 overall spending
- Hewlett-Packard – $281,110 overall spending
- Computer Sciences Corporation – $158,037 overall spending
- Dell technologies – $157,202 overall spending
- Unisys – $91,053 overall spending
- Jeppesen Sanderson – information not available
