Sanders Probes Trump's Corporate Welfare as Walmart Hits $1 Trillion Market Cap

US Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday launched an investigation into how corporations including Walmart—which hit $1 trillion in market value earlier this week—benefit from tax breaks in Republicans' so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act while many of their workers can't make ends meet.

Sanders (I-Vt.) informed Walmart president and CEO Doug McMillon and the heads of Kroger, Dollar General, and Dollar Tree in separate letters that he's probing how the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) passed by the GOP-controlled Congress and signed by President Donald Trump last year "has negatively impacted the health and well-being of workers at large corporations... and how it has financially benefited the owners and executives of these multinational conglomerates."

"This legislation made the largest cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) in history to pay for $1 trillion in tax breaks to the top 1% and over $900 billion in tax cuts to large corporations," noted Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

"As you know, Walmart is the largest corporation in America with over $680 billion in revenue, $19.4 billion in profits, and more than 2 million workers," Sanders wrote in his letter to McMillon. "Walmart also recently became the first retailer ever to hit $1 trillion in market value. It is owned by one of the wealthiest families in America, the Walton family, which has become over $348 billion richer since 2017 and is now worth more than half a trillion dollars."

"Yet, despite the enormous wealth of the Walton family and these huge corporate profits, Walmart pays wages so low that many of its workers rely on public assistance to survive," the senator said. "At Walmart, tens of thousands of low-wage workers are forced to depend on SNAP to feed their families and Medicaid to get the healthcare they need—all paid for by US taxpayers."

"Walmart pays wages so low that many of its workers rely on public assistance to survive."

Sanders is asking the heads of the companies in his probe to "disclose how much they expect to make from the Republicans’ tax breaks and whether any of these savings will be passed along to workers."

“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 McMillon. "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.”