Police Tech Giant Axon Is Concealing Its Political Spending
Police body camera and weapons juggernaut Axon is reporting blockbuster earnings amid the Trump administration’s explosive spending on immigration policing. The company is resisting efforts to make it disclose its political spending strategy.
This year, Axon is expected to receive $220 million in taxpayer funding for a single Immigration and Customs Enforcement taser contract. (Dominic Gwinn / Middle East Images / AFP via Getty Images)
A massive corporation helping police surveil communities across America is trying to make sure nobody can surveil its political influence machine.
Police body camera and weapons juggernaut Axon is being sued by shareholders who allege it illegally blocked an investor-led proposal asking the company to detail its political spending — including dark money donations. This comes as Axon reports record lobbying expenditures, blockbuster earnings, and “major opportunit[ies]” amid the Trump administration’s explosive spending on immigration policing.
Axon was sued by shareholders last month after rejecting a transparency proposal asking the policing technology firm to disclose its political spending strategy and make transparent all direct and indirect political contributions. Under the law, companies may exclude nonbinding shareholder proposals from consideration for various reasons, including if they are determined to “micromanage” operations.
This is the justification Axon used to reject the political spending proposal, even though others of its kind have been adopted by hundreds of companies in recent years. Axon’s resistance to transparency comes as it has ramped up efforts to influence the political process. Last year, the firm spent a company record of $2.4 million lobbying the federal government to purchase its equipment, a 50 percent year-over-year increase (before 2022, the company had never spent more than $1 million). And in 2024, the firm formed the Axon Enterprise, Inc. PAC, which has already raised $70,000 for the firm’s preferred political candidates.
Axon — which controls as much as 85 percent of the body camera market — is resisting transparency as it reaps hundreds of millions of dollars in public awards. Axon has enjoyed $383 million in lifetime federal rewards, most of which came over the last five years. This year, the firm is expected to receive $220 million in taxpayer funding for a single Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taser contract, written with specifications only met by Axon products.
The Lever reported earlier this year that Axon’s CEO donated directly to key lawmakers behind Democrats’ ICE “reform” initiative allocating $20 million exclusively for body cameras. According to public filings, Axon fulfilled $73 million in federal contract obligations in 2025; that includes at least $13.1 million in new ICE awards. The company meanwhile boasted $2.8 billion in annual revenue last year, up 33 percent over 2024.
While Axon advertises its products as an accountability measure to hedge against police brutality, the evidence on whether body cameras actually affect policing outcomes is mixed, and their status as a surveillance tool is well documented.
Axon did not respond to the Lever’s request for comment.
Oversight “Vacuum”
Traditionally, firms seeking to scuttle investor proposals could seek input from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) by seeking “no-action” notices, in which financial regulators essentially blessed plans to omit certain shareholder proposals before they were official. By law, shareholders are entitled to respond to these filings, creating a path for productive negotiations between shareholders and companies.
But last year, SEC regulators announced they were abandoning this key regulatory mechanism, giving corporations what corporate governance experts argue is the basis to “unilaterally . . . omit a resolution without considering further input from proponents.”
Axon investors say suing “felt like [their] only option.” The Nathan Cummings Foundation, the social-justice-oriented shareholder advocacy group behind the disclosure proposal, argues that lawsuits like the one it filed against Axon “were previously considered a last resort. But now, for many, they’re the only option.”
According to the Nathan Cummings Foundation, in the months since the no-action notice rollback, other firms have exploited this oversight “vacuum” to “unilaterally omit shareholder proposals” with “very limited or very weak arguments” — including companies claiming that political spending disclosures “micromanage” them.
Recent developments follow years of tug-of-war over the SEC’s interpretation of the law. After the first Trump administration made it easier for companies to exclude shareholder ballots in 2017, financial regulators under President Joe Biden reversed course and announced the agency would protect investor proposals addressing a “significant social policy issue.”
The judge overseeing the shareholder lawsuit against Axon has asked the company to produce further evidence proving that political spending disclosure requirements would be overly burdensome. But in the meantime, the judge has asked both parties “to work together to draft a compromise shareholder proposal that satisfies” shareholders’ request for transparency.