Some of the most extreme examples of the gap between executive and median worker pay occurs at companies directly supported by federal contracts and subsidies, a new study has found.

The latest Executive Excess report, published annually by the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington-based thinktank, found that at many federally funded companies the gap is far in excess of what ordinary American taxpayers find acceptable.

Some of the largest defense contractors are the most glaring culprits, the report found.

The study, Taxpayers Subsidize Giant Corporate Pay Gaps, found that more than two-thirds of the top 50 government contractors and top 50 recipients of federal subsidies, receiving a total of $167bn, currently pay their chief executive officer more than 100 times their median worker pay.

All top 50 contractors paid their CEO more than 25 times the median worker’s pay – the maximum that modern management guru Peter Drucker has deemed appropriate and far more than the six-to-one pay ratio polls show most Americans find appropriate.

At the top of the scale are leading military contractors, with the top bosses at Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman each earning an average of $21m, or between 166 and 218 times average worker pay.

Nearly 70%, or $35.2bn, of Lockheed Martin’s $51bn in sales last year, came from business with the US government. With a CEO-worker ratio of 186-to-one, chief executive Marillyn Hewson went home with $23m compared to a worker average of $123,000.

Another company, the Geo Group, which took in $663m in 2017 from the justice department and homeland security to maintain immigrant family detention centers, paid CEO George Zoley $9.6m, or 271 times the employee average of just over $35,000.

The study also singled out Yum! Brands, beneficiary of a $7.25m taxpayer-backed loan from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation to finance the expansion of KFCs and Pizza Huts in Mongolia. The fast food giant paid its CEO 1,358 times as much as its median employee in 2017.

Even Walmart, the go-to source for government purchases of everything from TVs and doughnuts to $5 gift cards, paid half of its 2.3 million employees less than $19,177 last year. The company’s CEO, the study found, made 1,188 times that amount.

The yawning pay gap revealed by the study are extreme by any measure, says Sarah Anderson, Global Economy Project director for the institute behind the study, and far in excess of the four-to-one pay differential between the president of the United States ($400,000) and the federal government average of $82,000.

“We believe this is a good moment for policymakers to use some of this CEO-to worker pay gap to recoup some of the windfalls that went to companies through tax reform by putting tax penalties on companies with extreme gaps,” said Anderson.

Public support for such measures appears to be building ahead of November’s midterm elections, with states including Rhode Island, Minnesota, Connecticut, Illinois and Massachusetts, and cities such as San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, moving to impose pay-ratio caps.

The new data comes as previous studies indicate that corporate tax savings have done little to even out the executive-worker pay gap and, indeed may have exacerbated them as companies utilize the windfall to fund share-buybacks largely benefiting stock-holding senior management and institutional shareholders.

Efforts to curb extreme pay-ratio disparities have in the past found favor with politicians who now work in the Donald Trump administration. For example, in 2015, Mick Mulvaney, the current White House budget director, then a Republican congressman, tried to prevent the US Export-Import Bank from subsidizing any company with CEO pay more than 100 times median worker pay. But the effort has since languished, despite public support for the gap to be reduced, according to the report.

A 2015 study by the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University found that 74% of Americans believe that CEOs are not paid the correct amount relative to the average worker.

“There is a clear sense among the American public that CEOs are taking home much more in compensation than they deserve,” wrote David Larcker, co-author of Americans and CEO Pay: 2016 Public Perception Survey on CEO Compensation, a survey reported that the public had little knowledge of CEO compensation and often underestimated it by a factor of 10.

The study, amid growing awareness of executive-worker pay disparities, also found that the public support for caps on CEO pay has approval across party lines, with 52% of Republicans and 66% of Democrats expressing support for executive pay limits.