EXPOSEDbyCMD
Investigating Power
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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. may claim he will be “the best environmental president in American history,” but the Republican industrialist bankrolling the super PAC behind his longshot bid for the White House has a long history of violating environmental laws.
A Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) study of the railroad business that 81-year-old megadonor Timothy Mellon owned for 45 years shows numerous violations of federal and state environmental and safety laws, including a criminal conviction of the company for covering up a 2006 oil spill.
Mellon’s backing may be related to Kennedy’s recent emergence as a climate skeptic and harsh critic of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Despite being a former environmental lawyer and “crusader,” he has shifted his position so radically that former allies are calling his campaign a “climate disaster.” On the campaign trail, Kennedy has called the climate crisis “a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls, the same way the Covid crisis was,” blaming “intelligence agencies,” “the world economic forum,” and “the billionaire boys’ club at Davos” for efforts to control global warming.
Kennedy also denounces the EPA as “effectively run by the oil industry, the coal industry and the pesticide industry,” despite the fact that the fossil fuel industry and Republican state attorneys general have repeatedly sued the agency to challenge its regulations.
As the scion of the Mellon family banking and industrial empire, Mellon is the grandson of former Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon (who served under three presidents from 1921–32). He is also one of the top 10 contributors to federal campaigns in the U.S. — and the third biggest donor so far this election cycle.
According to OpenSecrets, Mellon has contributed $143 million to federal candidates since 2020.
During this election cycle alone he has given more than $50 million to GOP candidates and PACs, including over $20 million to the American Values 2024 super PAC that supports Kennedy’s independent run for president. This represents almost half of the PAC’s $43-million haul so far this cycle.
At the same time, Mellon is financing former President Trump’s third run for the White House. He has given $15 million so far this cycle to the pro-Trump Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC, after donating $20 million to America First Action for the 2020 election. In the last election cycle (2021–22), he gave $15 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund, the PAC that supports Republicans running for the U.S. House. Another $5 million from Mellon went to the super PAC supporting Wisconsin GOP Sen. Ron Johnson’s reelection campaign in 2022.
Mellon has never indicated why he is donating such large amounts to the super PAC supporting Kennedy while simultaneously serving as a megadonor to the PAC supporting Trump. Some speculate that he is trying to help the former president. On the other hand, the Mellon family has historic ties to the Kennedys, and over the years Mellon has been idiosyncratic in his giving — contributing to an effort to find Amelia Earheart’s plane, for instance.
Mellon’s exact worth is unknown, but Forbes estimates the extended family’s wealth to be $14.1 billion in 2024. It is also not known how much of his personal wealth is inherited, and how much came from his privately held business groups, Pan Am Systems and Pan Am Railroads, which ran railroads in New England from 1998 to 2022, when Mellon sold them to CSX Transportation.
Under Mellon’s ownership, Pan Am Railways repeatedly violated federal and state environmental and safety laws and was convicted of an environmental crime. In a case brought by the Massachusetts Attorney General, the company was found guilty of concealing a 2006 hazardous oil spill in its railyard, which only came to light because of an anonymous tip to state officials.
According to Good Jobs First’s Violation Tracker, Pan Am Railways failed to report the spill of an estimated 900 gallons of diesel fuel from a locomotive in its Ayer, Massachusetts railyard.
In 2011, a Massachusetts appeals court upheld a 2009 jury conviction of Pan Am and its subsidiaries on charges of violating the Massachusetts Oil and Hazardous Material Release Prevention Act and failing to immediately notify the Department of Environmental Protection, as required by law. Ultimately, the companies were forced to pay a penalty of $500,000.
That’s not the only violation the company made. In 2017, a federal appeals court affirmed a decision by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) that Pan Am Railways pay $260,000 in punitive and compensatory damages to — and take corrective action on behalf of — a Maine employee who was subjected to retaliation for filing a Federal Railroad Safety Act whistleblower complaint over unsafe working conditions.
Also, in 2021 “Pan Am Railways agreed to pay a $140,000 penalty to [Maine’s] environmental clean-up fund and $60,000 to the State general fund in settlement of multiple alleged discharges of oil into state waters and ground, plus failure to pay Air Emissions Licensing and stormwater fees,” according to Violation Tracker.
On multiple occasions, state authorities and the EPA fined Mellon’s railroads five- and six-figure amounts for environmental violations, including improperly storing and disposing of hazardous waste and dumping waste without the permits required under the federal Clean Water Act.
On 19 occasions Pan Am’s subsidiary, Maine Central Railroad, was found guilty of safety-related offenses in violation of the Federal Railway Safety Act (FRSA).
Mellon’s personal record has also come under scrutiny. He used racial stereotypes to describe Black Americans in his 2015 autobiography, calling social safety net programs “Slavery Redux.” In 2021, Mellon transferred stock worth $53.1 million to the state of Texas for Governor Greg Abbott’s border wall fund, providing almost all of the money received by the fund. And in 2010, he donated $1.5 million to the state of Arizona’s legal defense fund as it fought lawsuits over its strict anti-immigrant law SB 1070, which has been widely criticized for encouraging racial profiling.
Mellon is related to the Scaife family, whose foundations are among the biggest sources of support for the right-wing movement — including several hate groups.
Don Wiener is a writer and researcher with the Center for Media and Democracy. Don has 40 years experience working as a policy analyst, researcher, media strategist, and coalition coordinator for dozens of community, public interest, labor, and environmental groups. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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