The Trump Administration has taken actions to prevent shareholders from being able to hold companies accountable for their political spending decisions, Public Citizen, an advocacy organization, found in an analysis.
In the Citizens United case of 2009 that allowed unlimited election spending by big corporations, the justices wrote: “There is, furthermore, little evidence of abuse that cannot be corrected by shareholders ‘through the procedures of corporate democracy.’”
However, in the first year of the second Trump Administration, the Securities Exchange Commission, or SEC, under Trump appointee Chair Paul Atkins, acted to erect barriers to shareholders holding companies accountable for corporate political spending.
In October, Atkins gave a speech outlining ways companies might more often be able to exclude shareholder proposals from being voted on.
In November, Atkins’ staff issued new guidelines that encouraged companies to exclude shareholder proposals from being voted on.
In addition, since November, Atkins’ staff has issued more than 70 “No Objection” letters to companies advising them that, based on the company’s representations, the SEC “will not object if the Company excludes the Proposal from its proxy materials.”
This includes SEC “No Objection” letters issued to four companies that seek to exclude political spending transparency shareholder proposals from their 2026 proxy statements: Pfizer, Teledyne Technologies Incorporated, Huntington Ingalls Industries, and Cadence Design Systems.
“SEC Chair Atkins’ draconian actions to silence shareholder voices have ripped away the fig leaf by which the Supreme Court aimed to hide the shame of Citizens United,” Jon Golinger, democracy advocate with Public Citizen, said in a statement. “Without shareholder accountability, we are even more at risk of corporations dictating the results of American elections.”
Golinger said Public Citizen is calling on Congress to pass legislation that prevents public companies from silencing their shareholders as a modest step to mitigate the harms of Citizens United.
He said Congress needs to adopt and the states would then ratify a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and related decisions and to restore the principle that we the people, not Big Money, need decide elections.”
Polling shows that the vast majority of Americans who are invested in the stock market as corporate shareholders strongly support increased transparency and accountability related to the political spending of publicly traded corporations, Golinger said.
