With massive fortunes to be made over the awarding of a government contract or the inclusion of favorable language in a bill or in federal regulation, lobbying has been one of the country’s true growth industries in recent decades.
The influence industry in Washington “has created a new generation of millionaires while reshaping the region in its wake,” The Nation noted this week in an extensive examination of lobbying. The D.C. skyline, once dominated by monuments, is now dotted with cranes building some $5.5 billion in new development. Census figures show that four of the five wealthiest counties in the country are in Washington suburbs.
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Big-name former lawmakers, including Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, Democratic Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and senators John Breaux (D-LA) and Don Nickles (R-OK), made millions after spinning through the revolving doors between Congress and lobbying and policy law firms.
The actual size of the industry is, however, a cause of disagreement. On the face of it, the lobbying business grew rapidly over the past decade – with overall spending hitting a record $3.55 billion in 2010 – before tapering off to $2.38 billion annually during the past three years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan watchdog. With the economy in the grips of the recession and partisan gridlock sorely limiting passage of legislation on Capitol Hill, the number of registered lobbyists shrank from 12,966 to 11,935 in that period.
Or so it seemed.
On paper, the influence-peddling business was drying up, wrote The Nation’s Lee Fang – yet lobbying money has been flooding Washington like never before.
Lobbying isn’t dying, according to Fang; it’s simply going underground. He quotes prominent experts to make that case.
The problem, according to American University professor James Thurber who has studied congressional lobbying for more than 30 years, is that “most of what is going on in Washington is not covered” by the lobbyist-registration system. There are so many loopholes – and the law is so weakly enforced – that former lawmakers, their staffs and other government professionals have scores of ways to influence the work of Congress and the administration without formally registering as lobbyists or disclosing their spending activities.
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Thurber, who is currently advising the American Bar Association’s lobbying-reform task force, estimates that the industry brings in more than $9 billion a year – or nearly three times as much as official reports, and that the true number of working lobbyists is closer to 100,000 than the roughly 12,000 reported.
“A loophole-ridden law, poor enforcement, the development of increasingly sophisticated strategies that enlist third-party validators and create faux-grassroots campaigns, along with an Obama administration executive order that gave many in the profession a disincentive to register – all of these forces have combined to produce a near-total collapse of the system that was designed to keep tabs on federal lobbying,” Fang says in The Nation.
Other experts, including assistant professor Timothy M. LaPiera of James Madison University and Lee Drutman, a lobbying expert at the Sunlight Foundation, say that at least twice as much money is being spent on lobbying as is officially reported – but they view Thurber’s estimate of more than $9 billion as inflated. “I don’t think it is outlandish, but it is informed speculation,” LaPiera said Monday. He estimates that “the industry itself is twice the size of what is publicly reported.”
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A highly regarded American political scholar, Thurber cautioned that the reporting on his estimates should be taken skeptically. That’s because he used such a broad, all-encompassing definition of lobbying that it could include virtually any law firm, lobby shop, contractor, think tank, political action group, advertising firm or other enterprise that in any way seeks to influence Congress or federal government regulators – from anywhere in the country.
“I kept saying that I was talking about the advocacy industry generally, with all its important activities, not lobbyists in the traditional definition of, you know, going up and talking to members of Congress and staff or people in the executive branch,” Thurber said in an interview on Monday. “I’m an outlier in terms of defining …. If you’re paid and trying to influence public policy, we should know about it. We should have transparency.”
A related issue, Thurber said, “We’ve got a huge advertising industry doing paid advertising – print, electronic, social media. We’ve got earned-media activities. We’ve got issue think tanks, and I don’t mean Brookings. I mean places like Cato and Heritage.
“We’ve got law firms with a lot of people who are not registering,” he continued, “because they don’t meet the standards of the Lobbying Disclosure Act definition. We’ve got people that are running big coalitions that are not registered . . . and we’ve got support staff for all those activities. We’ve got survey research people that between candidate campaigns are doing issue campaigns. Most firms have that as another dimension of their life. Then we have the grass roots organizations that are permanent, in many cases, and do not need to register because they are not affiliated with a registered lobbying activity.”
He added, “It’s not only the people here in Washington, but there are organizations on Madison Avenue, organizations out of Chicago, the AMA, organizations out of LA, that are trying to influence federal public policy not only on the Hill – that’s what most people think about – but also in the executive branch. And I think people who are selling airplanes – Boeing Aircraft – to the Defense Department are trying to influence public policy with huge amounts of money.” Then there is strategizing, he said, “where senior staff or members of Congress can leave and become strategists, not lobbyists. But it’s lobbying in my opinion.”
So when the government and watchdog groups say there are only 12,500 or so registered federal lobbyists, Thurber said, “You’re not at all getting close to the influence industry in Washington. When you add the support staff for all of it, it adds up to at least 100,000” people.
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