# US Chamber of Commerce The **U.S. Chamber of Commerce** is the largest business federation in the country and **America's #1 lobbying spender**: $72.2M in 2025, a position it has held for most of the last quarter century. Its headquarters sit across Lafayette Square from the White House. It is corporate America's collective voice on taxes, regulation, litigation and trade, and the anchor case for why the [[Trade Association]] form dominates the demand side of the [[Lobbying Hub]] census. Suzanne Clark has been CEO since 2021. Texas developer Ross Perot Jr. became chairman in June 2025. ## The Powell Memo institution The Chamber is the organization Lewis Powell wrote to. His 1971 confidential memo to the Chamber's education committee, "Attack on American Free Enterprise System," urged business to organize politically and litigate aggressively. Two months later Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court. The memo is the founding document of the corporate-political buildup that followed: the [[Business Roundtable]], the pro-business think tanks, and the Chamber's own litigation arm. Powell then wrote *First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti* (1978), which established that corporations have First Amendment rights to spend on ballot measures. That line runs to [[Citizens United v. FEC]]. See [[Powell Memo]] and [[Corporate Free Speech]]. ## The Chamber and Trump: aligned on most things, fighting on two The Chamber's second-term position is a split, and the split is the story. - **With the administration:** deregulation, extending the 2017 tax cuts, and the pro-growth agenda. Perot described relations with Republicans as strong when he took the chair. - **Against it on tariffs:** in January 2025 the Chamber's line was "yes to deregulation, no to blanket tariffs." Perot warned that the smallest members, "those with 10 employees," would bear the cost. After the Supreme Court struck the IEEPA tariffs, Senators Schumer and Wyden wrote to Clark in March 2026 asking member companies to pass refunds on to customers. That is a measure of how visibly the business lobby had become the refund constituency. - **Against it in court on immigration:** on **Oct. 16, 2025**, the Chamber sued over Trump's **$100,000 fee** on new H-1B visas, arguing it overrode the fees Congress set. Judge Beryl Howell ruled for the government on **Dec. 23, 2025**, finding the proclamation rested on an express statutory grant, and the Chamber appealed to the D.C. Circuit. A separate suit by states produced the opposite result in Massachusetts, and the First Circuit left that injunction in place in July 2026, so the fee is blocked through the states' case, not the Chamber's. The pattern matches the wider [[Tech Right]] and business realignment. The Chamber's institutional conservatism, free trade and high-skilled immigration, is the part of the old Republican coalition that the populist right has walked away from. It still wins most of its fights on regulation and taxes. ## See also - [[Lobbying Hub]] · [[Trade Association]] · [[Lobbying]] · [[Business Roundtable]] - [[Powell Memo]] · [[Lewis Powell]] · [[First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti]] · [[Corporate Free Speech]] - [[Citizens United v. FEC]]