About LobbySpend

Why federal lobbying disclosure deserves a public-facing home

The Lobbying Disclosure Act requires every registered lobbyist and lobbying organization in the United States to file quarterly disclosure reports with the Senate’s Lobbying Disclosure Office. The reports cover who is lobbying, on whose behalf, on which specific issues, and for how much money. The system is public, free, and comprehensive. What is missing is a navigable presentation layer that lets a citizen, journalist, or researcher trace federal lobbying activity at the industry, company, or state level without manually parsing tens of thousands of LD-2 PDFs.

LobbyMap builds that navigation layer. Every industry page rolls up the lobbying spend by sector; every state page surfaces the in-state lobbying activity; every grade page groups entities by their relative spend tier. The underlying data is the Senate’s LD-2 record; the value the site adds is the structure that makes the data accessible at scales below the firm-by-firm filing level.

How the pipeline pulls disclosure data

The pipeline pulls the quarterly LD-2 filings from the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Office’s bulk data exports on the same release cadence — within weeks of each quarter close. The filings are parsed for lobbying client, lobbying firm, specific issues, and reported spend, then aggregated into the per-industry, per-state, and per-spending-tier views.

A practical detail: filings cover federal lobbying only. State-level lobbying disclosures are run by each state’s secretary of state or ethics commission separately, on different cadences and forms. LobbyMap is the federal picture; readers researching state-level lobbying need to go to the state’s own disclosure portal.

Where lobbying disclosure has caveats

Three caveats. First, the LDA threshold for filing is relatively low (currently $14,000 per quarter), so the disclosure picture covers a substantial share of paid federal advocacy but excludes the smallest engagements. Grassroots organizing and unpaid issue advocacy are not in the disclosure system.

Second, the LD-2 reports list specific issues but at a coarse-grained level — the issue categories cover broad topics and do not capture the specific bill or rule the lobbyist was working on. For bill-level tracking, the disclosure data needs to be paired with Congressional voting records or rule-making dockets.

Third, the reported spend is the lobbying organization’s own self-report. The numbers can be subject to interpretation, particularly around whether to capitalize office overhead or pure-advocacy costs. Year-over-year changes within a single firm or client are the most reliable signal The methodology page on this site documents every dataset, every refresh cadence, and every limitation in detail so readers can trace any numeric value on the site back to the underlying federal source. We treat that traceability as a hard requirement for any data product that asks readers to make real-world decisions on its output.; cross-firm comparisons require care because of these reporting differences. Every page on the site links back to the originating federal dataset for verification; readers using the data for decisions should always cross-reference the most recent source release rather than treating any site value as the final word. Federal data products are continuously revised, and the live source is always the right reference for time-sensitive decisions.