Updated May 2026 · Senate LDA filings
Defense & Aerospace, Lobbying Spending
36 organizations · $452.5M total spend
Defense & Aerospace is a heavy-engagement sector in the LobbySpend index. Its 36 tracked organizations have collectively reported $452.5M in disclosed federal lobbying — a meaningful share of total disclosed lobbying activity, typical of industries whose core economics are directly shaped by federal rulemaking.
What These Numbers Mean
Average disclosed spend per organization in Defense & Aerospace is $12.6M, indicating a mix of large filers and steady mid-tier programs. Per-firm averages in this range are typical of mature industries with multiple long-running corporate government-affairs operations.
Within Defense & Aerospace, the disclosed-spend leader is Lockheed Martin at $69.2M, narrowly ahead of Northrop Grumman at $62.9M. Sector leadership in this industry has historically rotated as major bills and rulemakings move through Congress.
Every figure on this page is drawn from filings submitted to the Senate Office of Public Records under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. Filings are quarterly and public domain. The campaign-finance research project at OpenSecrets uses the same Senate LDA filings as one input and frequently provides additional reporting on individual sector filers.
Top Policy Issues
Top-issue coverage for Defense & Aerospace is unusually broad — at least 10 distinct issue areas appear in the sector's aggregated filings, signalling that filers in this industry engage Congress on a wide regulatory front rather than a single defining policy.
Top Spenders in Defense & Aerospace
How to Read This Page
Industry pages aggregate all LobbySpend-tracked filers whose primary business sits in the same sector. The total-spend number is the sum of disclosed dollars across every quarterly LDA filing for those filers in the years tracked, deduplicated against amendments. The per-organization average is the simple mean and is sensitive to the presence of one or two megaspenders — for sectors with extreme top-heaviness, the median is typically a more useful summary, which the underlying data supports if you click through to the individual filer pages.
The top-issues breakdown reflects filer-allocated dollars on each filing — registrants are required to report which general issue areas they lobbied on and, where applicable, how spend was allocated. Issue dollars should be read as a directional signal of where attention is concentrated rather than as audited line items. For the full Influence Score formula and known limitations of LDA disclosures, see the methodology page.
Defense & Aerospace organizations have collectively disclosed $452.5M in federal lobbying across 36 tracked filers, drawn from Senate LDA quarterly disclosure filings.
The this entity record above pulls directly from the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Office LD-2 filings. What follows is the per-entity context — how this entity sits in the broader U.S. federal lobbying disclosure distribution and which underlying factors drive the headline numbers.
The methodology behind every numeric value on this page is publicly documented on the the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Office LD-2 filings portal and described in detail on this site’s methodology page. Refresh cadence varies by underlying series; the page surfaces the as-of date for each number so readers can trace any figure back to the source release.
For readers using this page as a decision input, the related-entity pages elsewhere on the site provide the comparison set. The most useful comparison for this entity is typically a peer within U.S. lobbying activity with similar size, similar exposure, or similar geography — not the national-level summary alone.