Pick a large American company, and it’s a pretty safe bet that you’ve just named a firm that’s well-represented in Washington. Virtually every industry leader has a political action committee and a few of the best lobbyists money can buy.

Of course, some industries invest much more in D.C. than others. Even within industries, firms vary greatly in their spending on campaign contributions and lobbying, whether due to factors specific to their line of work, the ideological tendencies of their management, or any number of other reasons. And some of the country’s biggest firms choose not to play the game at all.

Which are the largest companies, using the most recent Fortune 500 rankings, with little or no track record of federal political spending? Since foreign corporations can’t establish federal PACs, we’ll limit this analysis to domestic companies. (U.S. subsidiaries of foreign corporations, however, can have PACs. In fact, the world’s largest corporation, Royal Dutch Shell, is connected to a PAC through its subsidiary Shell Oil.)

Technically, the largest firm without a PAC in its own name is Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. This may sound surprising, given that Buffett, who hails from Nebraska, is hardly an unfamiliar face in Washington. However, several of Berkshire Hathaway’s subsidiaries have PACs of their own, which in combination are large enough that Berkshire Hathaway is actually one of the 20 biggest sources of PAC funds to Republican candidates this cycle.

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Excluding Buffett’s umbrella corporation, the largest company without a PAC is an even more familiar name: Apple. While the high-tech industry’s presence in Washington hasn’t always grown apace with its economic importance, Apple’s footprint in D.C. is small even in the tech world. Google, which didn’t crack Fortune’s top 50 in revenue, has both a PAC and a lobbying budget that was nearly 10 times the size of Apple’s in 2012.

On the subject of lobbying, what’s the largest U.S. company with no history of lobbying the federal government? The answer is a little farther down Fortune’s list, but still in the top 25 in revenue: Costco. With just under $100 billion in revenue, Costco is one of the country’s biggest retailers, but eschews lobbying despite having a CEO who makes no secret of his political opinions. Outside the Beltway, however, Costco has occasionally thrown its money around, spending more than $20 million on a successful ballot initiative to allow privately-owned retailers to sell alcohol in Washington State.

Revenue is only one way to measure a corporation’s size, and doesn’t always correspond to intuitions about which companies are the “biggest”; McDonald’s, for example, isn’t among Fortune’s top 100. What if we rank companies by number of employees instead? Again excluding Berkshire Hathaway, the largest corporation with no PAC is TJX, the Massachusetts-based parent of both TJ Maxx and Marshalls. With 179,000 employees, perhaps TJX feels confident that being a major employer in many districts will ensure that elected officials give it all the attention it needs. As it happens, the top employer with no history of lobbying is another clothing retailer: Macy’s Inc, just a few thousand employees smaller than TJX.

A final caveat: there are many strategies for winning friends and influencing people in Washington, and not all of them have to be disclosed. Given the growing popularity of alternatives to formal lobbying, for example, it’s always possible that companies like Costco and Macy’s are protecting their interests in other ways.



Image: Warren Buffett in 2013 (AP Photo/Nati Harnik)



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