Foreign Policy

Matthew Petti | 11.1.2024 11:53 AM

ZIP code 22101 is home to a lot of very powerful people. For one, it encompasses Langley, Virginia, home to the CIA's headquarters. But it's not just the CIA. The ZIP code also includes the nearby community of McLean, Virginia, home to many diplomatic residences and military contractors, such as Booz Allen Hamilton, former employer of Edward Snowden.

So it's fair to say that many of the people of 22101 care a lot about U.S. national security policy. One of the ways they, like all Americans, can express themselves is by donating to political campaigns. And as with all Americans, they're required to disclose these donations along with their name, address, and occupation to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), which posts them online. Although the privacy and free speech implications of requiring that kind of disclosure are not great, the FEC filings for 2023–2024 make for interesting reading.

Again, not everyone who lives in Langley and McLean works for the CIA, and not everyone who works for the intelligence agency lives in the same ZIP code. But because the local economy is so tied to the deep state and the military-industrial complex, the flow of campaign donations says something about the tendencies of America's national security elite.

The top five recipients of donations from 22101 were all Democratic: the Harris Victory Fund, the Democratic National Committee, Kamala Harris for President, the Democratic Grassroots Victory Fund, and the Democratic political action committee ActBlue. (In sixth place was The Lincoln Project, the ex-Republican movement that raked in $630,109 from donors in 22101.) That shouldn't be much of a surprise, considering that President Joe Biden won Fairfax County by more than........

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