John Carter has one of the most valuable gavels in Congress and almost nobody outside Washington knows he has it.

He is the chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies. That subcommittee writes the annual bill that decides which bases get new barracks, which hangars get built, which family housing gets replaced, and how much money the VA has to work with. He also sits on the Defense subcommittee, which writes the Pentagon's operating budget.

Now look at who funds him.

Eleven of his top twenty PAC donors are defense and aerospace contractors

According to Who Bought My Rep, which builds its totals from federal campaign filings, Carter has raised $6.2 million since 2020. Here are the defense and aerospace companies sitting in his top twenty PAC donors, with what each has given:

Eleven of the twenty. More than half of the biggest PACs backing this member of Congress are companies whose federal revenue he helps decide.

The money isn't coming from home

The other half of the picture is who isn't paying for his campaigns.

Small donors — the kind of money that comes from a district — account for 6% of Carter's funding. PACs and super PACs account for 43%. He ranks #281 out of 440 House members in grassroots funding, and #165 out of 275 Republicans. In a chamber where nearly everyone takes corporate PAC money, he is in the bottom half of his own party at raising money from actual people.

Texas's 31st District contains Fort Hood. The servicemembers and veterans there have a genuine interest in a well-funded military construction bill. So do BAE, Lockheed and General Dynamics. The problem isn't that those interests never overlap. The problem is what happens when they don't — and who has the chairman's ear when that day comes.

Why this arrangement is the point

It is worth being clear about what is and isn't alleged here. There is no evidence that Carter has broken a law. Corporate PAC money to appropriators is legal, routine, and disclosed — that's how we know about it.

That's also the indictment. The system doesn't require anyone to be bribed. It just requires that the person who writes the check gets a phone call answered, a meeting scheduled, and a line item read sympathetically, while the constituent who gave nothing gets a district office that hasn't held an in-person town hall since 2013.

This is the same pattern we found one committee over: Brian Babin chairs the committee that writes NASA's marching orders, and six space and defense contractors have given him $261,250. Different agency, identical structure — the chairman's biggest backers are the firms his gavel pays.

What he does with it

In May 2026, the House passed Carter's Fiscal Year 2027 Military Construction and Veterans Affairs bill 400 to 15. A near-unanimous vote is not a scandal — it means the bill was mostly uncontroversial.

But a near-unanimous vote is also exactly the kind of vote where the interesting decisions happened months earlier, in a subcommittee markup, out of the news, on line items nobody outside the industry can read. That is where a chairman's judgment matters most, and it is the part of his job Carter is least often asked about — because he doesn't take questions in person.

Carter is 84 and has been in Congress for 23 years. He was put in charge of this subcommittee in 2018. Voters in the 31st District have had no in-person forum to ask him a single question about any of it.

We deserve better.

Sources

PAC and grassroots funding figures: Who Bought My Rep — Carter, John R., compiled from Federal Election Commission filings, 2020–present. Committee roles: House Appropriations Committee. Photo: official U.S. House portrait.