NEWS: Sanders Launches Investigation into Trump’s Corporate Welfare for Walmart & Wealthy Corporations

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 - Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Ranking Member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), today announced an investigation into how Walmart, Kroger, Dollar General and Dollar Tree stand to benefit from large tax breaks in President Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill," while they force tens of thousands of their employees to rely on Medicaid and SNAP. This situation will be made even worse as a result of the largest cut to Medicaid and nutrition assistance in American history that Republicans enacted last year.

"It has never been acceptable that incredibly profitable companies like Walmart - owned by one of the richest families on Earth - pay their workers starvation wages, forcing many of them to rely on programs like Medicaid and SNAP," Sanders wrote to Walmart. "But it is even more unacceptable when those benefits are being slashed so that corporate executives and billionaires like the Walton family can become even richer."

As part of the investigation, Sanders requested that Walmart and the other major retailers disclose how much they expect to make from the Republicans' tax breaks and whether any of these savings will be passed along to workers. At a time when their corporate leaders and wealthy shareholders stand to benefit significantly from President Trump's so-called "One Big Beautiful Bill" which gave a $1 trillion tax break to the top one percent and over $900 billion in tax benefits to large corporations, Sanders called on the highly profitable companies to increase their employees' pay and benefits so that taxpayers are no longer forced to subsidize the starvation wages they currently offer.

"Kroger pays wages so low that many of its workers rely on public assistance to survive," Sanders wrote to Kroger. "At Kroger, tens of thousands of low-wage workers are forced to turn to SNAP to feed their families and Medicaid to get the health care they need - all paid for by U.S taxpayers."

In 2025, taxpayers paid more than $26 million just to provide Medicaid to Walmart workers and their families in Nevada alone. Even though Walmart and other major retailers could afford to provide their employees with a living wage and comprehensive health care benefits, they choose to enrich their executives and shareholders instead. For example:

1. Walmart made $19.4 billion in profits in 2024 and spent at least $7 billion on stock buybacks in 2025. Meanwhile, one in five Walmart employees in Nevada are on Medicaid.
2. In 2024, Dollar General made $40.6 billion in revenue and paid its shareholders $519 million in dividends. In 2022, Dollar General spent $2.75 billion on stock buybacks.
3. Dollar Tree's CEO, Michael C. Creedon, made 592 times the average pay of a Dollar Tree employee in 2024, while Dollar Tree spent hundreds of millions of dollars in stock buybacks each year from 2022-2024.

"At a time of massive wealth and income inequality, I am respectfully asking that the multi-billionaire owners of Walmart and other large corporations do the right thing: get off of corporate welfare and pay all of your workers a living wage with good benefits," Sanders concluded in the letter to Walmart. "No one who works for a company that generates billions of dollars in profits should be living in poverty, going hungry or unable to get the medical care they need without taxpayer assistance."

Read the letters here.

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