Trend Reports

Each report is built from quarterly filings published by the Senate Office of Public Records under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. After each refresh, an automated pipeline compares the new aggregated totals to the previous baseline and surfaces movements that clear minimum dollar and percent thresholds — the goal is to filter routine quarter-to-quarter wobble out and highlight the genuine step changes that warrant a closer look.

Of the current set: 2 entity snapshots. Movement reports — both up and down — are framed as observations about disclosed activity, not judgments about strategy or effectiveness. For independent context on any of the named filers, the campaign-finance research project at OpenSecrets uses the same Senate LDA filings as one input and frequently provides additional reporting on individual lobbyists, named bills, and related campaign contributions.

Trend reports are descriptive, not editorial. A "decline" tag means the filer's disclosed dollars went down quarter-over-quarter or year-over-year; it does not imply the organization stopped lobbying, lost interest, or changed strategy. Likewise an "improvement" tag tracks a rise in disclosed activity, not a judgment about the policy positions advanced. The full detail behind each label — the underlying years, the magnitude, the sector context — is on the linked report page.

Each report card shows three things up front: a type tag (improvement, decline, aggregate, snapshot), an entity count (how many distinct registrants, sectors, or issues the report covers), and a one-line subtitle describing the headline finding. Clicking through opens the full report with year-by-year tables, the underlying methodology, and links to every entity referenced.

Aggregate reports are the most useful for big-picture context — they summarize how an entire sector, issue area, or filer cohort moved between quarters. Snapshot reports are the most useful for understanding a single registrant's recent trajectory in detail. Improvement and decline reports sit in between: they isolate the largest single-entity movers in either direction and place each one against its sector baseline.

For a full description of how the index is built and how the Influence Score is calculated, see the methodology page. For definitions of any LDA-specific terminology used in a report, the glossary covers covered positions, general issue codes, registrant types, and the FARA distinction.