Roll Call is reporting today that annual Washington lobbying expenditures dipped slightly in 2010, marking the first time since expenditure data became public in 1996 that the amount of money has not increased. The decline was small: from $3.6 billion to $3.5 billion (according to CQ MoneyLine). But it’s worth asking: does this mark some kind of leveling off of lobbying in Washington?
Some background: there has been a remarkable increase in lobbying expenditures since 1998, when a mere $1.44 billion was spent on lobbying. More organizations have come to Washington, and in particular more companies are spending more money on lobbying. OpenSecrets.org has the history, and there’s been roughly a steady 7 percent annual increase in lobbying since 1998.
If there truly is leveling off, it would be a remarkable development. But I’m skeptical.
One possibility is that more reports will be trickling in late, and this early report will turn out to be an underestimate.
A more likely possibility is that the reporting is inaccurate. Organizations and companies may be reporting less lobbying in response to the Obama administration lobbying rules, which create all kinds of hurdles for former lobbyists who want to serve in the administration. In 2008, OpenSecrets counted 14,214 registered lobbyists; in 2010, it counted just 12,484 – a decline of 12 percent.
There is good reason to believe that a lot of lobbyists have increasingly decided it was better not to register, or even just slightly adjust their portfolios and work schedules so that they technically didn’t meet the definition of a “lobbyist” under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. The Senate Office of Public Records, which keeps track of these registrations and reports, is perpetually understaffed and not well-equipped to go after anybody.
If this is the case, it’s a shame, because it means that by unnecessarily demonizing lobbyists, the Obama lobbying rules may have actually made the practice of lobbying less transparent by encouraging fewer lobbyists to register and publicly file reports.
Of course, it’s also possible that with the passage of heath care and financial reform, as well as the breakdown of climate legislation, the big lobbying dogs have less reason to be active, and with two years of gridlock ahead, it’s possible some interests realize nothing is going to get through, so why waste the money? But both health care and financial reform have major agency rulemakings ahead, and gridlock may actually require more lobbying grease.
Still, if it is a leveling off, I suspect it’s only a temporary one. As I argued in my Ph.D. dissertation on the growth of corporate lobbying (which accounts for about two-thirds of all lobbying expenditures), “More and more companies are discovering that Washington matters to their business, and those who do are sticking around and increasing their political capacities. As a result, corporate lobbying activity is likely to continue to expand for the foreseeable future, with large corporations playing an increasingly central role in the formulation of national policies.”
There’s simply too much at stake, and still for many large corporations, the amount of money they spend on lobbying is still a rounding error on their annual budgets (and much less than they spend on advertising or R&D). Rather, I suspect more and more companies will continue to realize that the reality is they can’t afford not to be lobbying.
