The Securities and Exchange Commission, overseen by crypto millionaire Paul Atkins, just agreed to drop its lawsuit against the cryptocurrency exchange Ripple after Biden-era regulators sued the firm for alleged securities fraud. Ripple, which will still have to pay a $125 million fine, gave $4.9 million to Trump’s inauguration in January and paid nearly $800,000 to lobby the federal government in the first half of fiscal 2025. That included $260,000 spent lobbying on issues related to crypto regulation paid to DC’s newly crowned lobbying king, Ballard Partners.
Ballard Partners was founded in 1998 by wealthy conservative donor Brian Ballard — a major MAGA fundraiser since Trump’s first campaign. Ballard Partners also previously employed Trump’s White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, until 2020, and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, until her confirmation in January.
The firm’s clout within Trumpworld has made Ballard the highest-earning lobbying shop in the United States, raking in more than $20 million just last quarter from clients clamoring to get the ear of the White House. (It’s overtaken powerhouse Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, which has long used DC’s revolving door to help its corporate and oligarch clients.) If Ballard Partners’ luck continues, its annual revenues will rival those of small government agencies — a “lobbying gusher,” Politico reports, crowning “a new set of power brokers in Trump’s swamp.”
Ballard’s clients include American Express Global Business Travels, which recently scored a win when Bondi’s Justice Department canceled a challenge to its planned $540 million acquisition of a competitor. The move came after the financial giant paid Ballard Partners $200,000 to lobby Bondi’s agency on antitrust and other matters this year.
Ballard also does business with UnitedHealth, which has paid the firm more than any other lobbying group this year as part of a $7.8 million spending blitz — double what the health giant spent during the first half of 2024. The Justice Department just approved a deal expanding UnitedHealth Group’s sprawling health network into the hospice business with the $3.3 billion acquisition of Amedisys, an end-of-life and palliative home health care firm. The regulatory giveaway rubber-stamps the merger — despite concerns the move will “supercharge health care dysfunction” — as long as UnitedHealth divests slivers of its operation totaling less than half a billion in annual revenue.
Bondi’s Justice Department lawyers approved the deal even though the agency admits executives falsified information in merger application filings. The $528 million in assets UnitedHealth will have to divest will go to a health services firm owned by private equity firm KKR, which is also facing a lawsuit for serially lying in merger paperwork.
Ballard Partners’s founder, Brian Ballard, was a trusted member of Trump’s donor circle until he was recently made a persona non grata, at least temporarily, after he pushed the president too hard on favors for Ripple.
That has yet to make a dent in Ballard’s bottom line: so far in 2025, his firm counts among its clients some of the biggest corporations in the world, many with significant business before the Trump administration. They include Amazon, which has been awarded billions in federal cloud computing contracts, and Chevron, which just acquired competitor Hess with Trump regulators’ approval.
Other clients include JPMorgan Chase, which was sued in December by Joe Biden’s regulators for allegedly ignoring rampant fraud, and Novo Nordisk, whose wildly profitable drugs Ozempic and Wegovy are slated for Medicare price negotiations.
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