The U.S. subsidiary of a Chinese electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer and its top executive have given hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign cash to Democrats in recent years.
Stella Li, a top executive for BYD Americas, and the company itself have given tens of thousands of dollars in campaign cash to Democratic candidates and organizations in California and beyond over the past decade, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of federal and state political spending records. Based in China, BYD is the biggest EV producer in the world, and Congress moved in January to ban the Pentagon from buying its batteries due to security risks, according to Bloomberg News.
For example, BYD and Li gave more than $40,000 to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) between 2020 and 2023, according to the DCNF’s review of political spending records. The company and Li have also poured more than $30,000 into organizations boosting President Joe Biden’s 2024 reelection effort to date.
Newsom test drives an EV hybrid made by a Chinese company he once gave a no-bid contract to https://t.co/97IdXPNkWs
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom received about $60,000 from Li and BYD USA between 2018 and 2023. Newsom drew scrutiny for his administration’s decision to give BYD a $1 billion no-bid contract to supply protective equipment during the coronavirus pandemic despite the company’s core competency being in a different business, and Newsom subsequently took a BYD vehicle for a publicized test drive during a 2023 trip to mainland China.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa received more than $10,000 from Li to help his failed 2018 gubernatorial campaign, while the California Democratic Party received approximately $19,000 from Li and BYD USA between 2018 and 2020, according to the DCNF’s review of political spending records.
Michael Anotovich, former Chair of the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors and an architect of California’s bullet train project, received more than $11,000 from BYD USA and its executives in 2015 and 2016 to help his political career, according to the DCNF’s review of political spending records. Anotovich often governed in ways that benefited BYD, such as when he, along with Villaraigosa, steered millions of dollars from a Los Angeles municipal clean bus testing program toward BYD, the Los Angeles Times reported in 2018.
Additionally, BYD USA forked over $25,000 to a 501(c)(4) organization called California For Safe, Reliable Infrastructure in 2018, according to the DCNF’s review of state records. Californians For Safe, Reliable Infrastructure was an organization that opposed the failed Proposition 6 in 2018, which would have repealed a 12 cent per-gallon tax on gasoline passed the prior year and required voter approval for future tax or fee increases on gasoline.
Ed Chau — formerly a member of the California State Assembly — raked in $7,000 from BYD USA and executives to boost his ambitions in 2018 and 2020, according to the DCNF’s political spending records review. Notably, Chau nominated Li for a “woman of the year” prize in his district in 2018.
Buttigieg says you don’t have to worry about gas prices if you buy an electric vehicle…someone should remind him how out of touch he sounds pic.twitter.com/tiJVkl7wB3
Meanwhile, BYD USA and Li gave Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de Leon more than $19,000 in 2017 and 2018, according to the DCNF’s review. Notably, then- President pro Tempore of the California Senate de Leon said that “California and the rest of the nation needs more companies like BYD that take opportunities presented by policy and turn it in to job creation” regarding the 2017 ribbon cutting ceremony for BYD USA’s expansion of its Lancaster, California manufacturing facility.
BYD is one of the biggest EV manufacturers in the world, though its Americas subsidiary focuses specifically on electric trucks, forklifts, and buses, according to its website. The company is reportedly examining options for penetrating the U.S. EV market by way of Mexico, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) recently-finalized tailpipe emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles may end up benefiting BYD USA in the long-term, according to analysis by HEATMAP, a climate-focused publication.
The company has expanded its presence around the world in recent years under the “impetus” of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), according to a 2018 paper published in Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research. The BRI is a $1 trillion Chinese government effort to build infrastructure projects and accrue economic influence in other countries that is “widely recognized as an economic power play that could challenge U.S. influence geopolitically,” according to the Jamestown Foundation.
Additionally, BYD is touted in severalarticlesposted to an official Chinese government website called “Belt and Road Portal.”
Moreover, Congress has specifically flagged the company in two separate National Defense Authorization Acts (NDAA). The 2020 NDAA contained a provision that banned public funds going to boost China-linked transportation companies like and including BYD, according to The Washington Post, and the NDAA that passed in December 2023 prohibits the Pentagon from buying batteries made by BYD and five other Chinese companies starting in 2027, according to Bloomberg.
The offices of Newsom, Ma, de Leon, BYD USA, the DNC, the California Democratic Party, ActBlue, and the Biden campaign did not respond to requests for comment. Anotovich could not be reached for comment, and Villaraigosa’s current employer did not respond to a request for comment on his behalf, nor did the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, on which Chau now sits.
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The FDA old guard criticized the new leadership in a Dec. 3 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) letter over a higher regulatory bar for vaccines, namely the expectation that most new vaccine approvals will require randomized clinical trials, arguing it could hamper the market.
“Insisting on long, expensive outcomes studies for every updated formulation would delay the arrival of better-matched vaccines when new outbreaks emerge or when additional groups of patients could benefit,” the former commissioners wrote. “Abandoning the existing methods won’t ‘elevate vaccine science’ … It will subject vaccines to a substantially higher and more subjective approval bar.”
But while the former commissioners disclosed their conflicts of interest to the medical journal — per standard practice in scientific publishing — reporters didn’t relay them to the broader public in reports in the Washington Post, STAT News and CNN.
The headlines about a bipartisan rebuke from former occupants of FDA’s highest office give the impression that the Trump administration is contravening established science, but closer inspection reveals a revolving door between pharmaceutical corporations and the agencies overseeing them.
Three of the signatories have received payments totaling $6 million from manufacturers or former manufacturers of COVID vaccines.
Scott Gottlieb has received $2.1 million in cash and stock from his position on the Pfizer board of directors, where he has advised on ethics and regulatory compliance since 2019, according to company filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Stephen Ostroff has received $752,310 from Pfizer in consulting fees since 2020, according to OpenPayments.
Gottlieb and McClellan did not respond to requests for comment. Ostroff could not be reached for comment.
FDA Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research Director Vinay Prasad outlined the higher standards and shared the results of an internal analysis validating 10 reports of children’s deaths following the COVID-19 vaccine in a Nov. 28 memo to staff. He called for introspection and reform at the agency.
The NEJM letter criticizes Prasad for cracking down on a practice called “immunobridging” that infers vaccine efficacy from laboratory tests rather than assessing it through real-world reductions in disease or death. The FDA under the Biden administration expanded COVID vaccines to children using this “immunobridging” technique, extrapolating vaccine efficacy from adults to children based on antibody levels.
Norman Sharpless — who in addition to previously serving as acting FDA commissioner also served as the head of the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute — consults for Tempus, a company that collaborates with COVID vaccine maker BioNTech. He has helped steer $70 million in investments in biotech through a venture capital firm he founded in November 2024. Sharpless also disclosed $26,180 in payments in 2024 from Chugai Pharmaceutical, a Japanese pharmaceutical company that markets mRNA technology among other drugs, on OpenPayments.
“I was grateful for the opportunity to serve as NCI Director and Acting FDA Commissioner in the first Trump Administration, and strongly support many of the things President Trump is trying to do in the current Administration,” Sharpless said in an email.
Margaret Hamburg, another former FDA commissioner and signatory of the NEJM letter, has since 2020 earned $2.8 million as a member of the board of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, which markets RNA interference (RNAi) technology.
Hamburg did not respond to a message on LinkedIn.
Most signatories disclosed income from biotech companies testing experimental cancer treatments. These products could face tighter scrutiny under Prasad, a hematologist-oncologist long wary of rubberstamping pricey oncology drugs — which Prasad points out often cause some toxicity — without plausible evidence of an improvement in quality of life or survival.
The former FDA commissioners disclosed ties to Sermonix Pharmaceuticals Inc.; OncoNano Medicine; incyclix; Nucleus Radiopharma; and N-Power, a contractor that runs oncology clinical trials.
Andrew von Eschenbach, who like Sharpless formerly served both as FDA commissioner and the head of the National Cancer Institute, disclosed stock in HistoSonics, a company with investments from Bezos Expeditions and Thiel Bio seeking FDA approval for ultrasound technology targeted at tumors.
Some FDA commissioners who signed onto the letter opposing changes to vaccine approvals have ties to biotechnology investment firms, namely McClellan, who consults Arsenal Capital; Janet Woodcock, who consults RA Capital Management; and Robert Califf, who owns stock in Population Health Partners.
Califf did not respond to an email requesting comment. Woodcock did not respond to requests for comment sent to two medical research advocacy groups with Woodcock on the board. Eschenbach did not respond to a LinkedIn message.
The two signatories without pharmaceutical ties may find their judgement challenged by the FDA investigation into COVID-19 vaccine deaths, having either implemented or formally defended the Biden administration’s headlong expansion of vaccines and boosters to healthy adults and children.
David Kessler executed Biden’s vaccination policy as chief science officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, helping to secure deals for shotswith Pfizer and Moderna.
Meanwhile Jane Henney chaired a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report published in October 2025 that praised the performance of FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) vaccine surveillance during the pandemic — underwritten with CDC funding.
That assessment clashes with that of a Senate report, citing internal documents from FDA, finding that CDC never updated its vaccine surveillance tool “V-Safe” to include cardiac symptoms, despite naming myocarditis as a potential adverse event by October 2020, and that top officials in the Biden administration delayed warning pediatricians and other providers about the risk of myocarditis after their approval in some children in May 2021, months after Israeli health officials first detected it in February 2021. The Senate investigation named Woodcock, a signatory of the NEJM letter, as one of the FDA officials who slow-walked the warning.
The U.S. Department of Justice will not release the entirety of the federal government’s files on sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein by the end of day Friday, failing to fully comply with a mandate from Congress.
DOJ will release several hundred thousand documents, however, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a Fox News interview. He estimated that “several hundred thousand more” will be released “over the next couple of weeks.”
The delay, Blanche explained, is due to the significant number of redactions that the department must complete in order to protect the identifications of witnesses and victims in the files.
By failing to fully comply with a congressional edict, lawmakers would have grounds to impeach or hold U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress.
Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on Nov. 18, which President Donald Trump signed into law the next day.
The bill, sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; and Thomas Massie, R-Ky., requires that the U.S. Attorney General “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice” that relate to Epstein and his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Any Justice Department official who does not comply with this law will be subject to prosecution for obstruction of justice,” Khanna vowed.
Epstein died in jail awaiting trial in 2019 and Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence.
President Donald Trump, former president Bill Clinton, billionaire businessman Bill Gates, and dozens of other high-profile figures have received intense public scrutiny for their connections with Epstein and Maxwell.
