The U.S. Chamber of Commerce claims to represent over three million businesses. But a new report from Public Citizen reveals the majority of the Chamber’s litigation activity supported large corporations.
An analysis of 400 recent cases from the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center’s online archive reveals the Chamber backed Fortune 500 litigants over 35% of the time, and backed big businesses outside of the Fortune 500 – those with revenue of more than a billion dollars – an additional 20% of the time.
“Chamber litigation appears to be an advocacy tool to shield America’s largest corporations from accountability, to the detriment of consumers and small businesses,” says Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen. “The Chamber is helping big companies to protect their profits by stopping or stalling reforms that would bring down healthcare costs or reduce the student loan debt of small business owners, for example.”
The report highlights the Chamber’s legal action to stop antitrust regulations, target the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and halt drug price negotiations under the Inflation Reduction Act, among others. These efforts are actually hurting the small businesses the Chamber claims to represent.
According to the analysis, a major focus of the Chamber’s litigation strategy was on restricting access to the courts, defined as issues relating to arbitration and/or class actions.
Meanwhile, the Chamber filed in support of at least one small business only 6% of the time, and only 23 of the roughly 28 million small businesses in the U.S. (0.0001%) directly benefited from the Chamber’s litigation.
A Public Citizen report last year revealed that nearly half of the money donated to the Chamber came from just 46 donors that gave $1 million or more.
