After building out a powerful influence machine in Washington over the last few years, Amazon is going on the attack. The Seattle-based company is pushing aside trade groups it doesn’t like and creating new ones it does. It’s dispatching senior executives to woo antitrust enforcers. And it’s poaching senior staff from government agencies and congressional offices. Federal records show that Amazon.com Inc. lobbied more government entities than any other tech company in 2018 and sought to exert its influence over more issues than any of its tech peers except Alphabet Inc.’s Google. Last year, Amazon spent $14.2 million on lobbying, a record for the company, up from its previous high mark of $12.8 million in 2017. The $77 million that the nine tech companies in the charts below spent in 2018 to lobby Washington looks minuscule next to the $280 million spent by pharmaceutical and health-care products companies. Tech has, however, pulled ahead of the $64 million that commercial banks spent—and Amazon in particular has a cachet that allows it to punch above its weight at times. Of the nine, only the $21 million Google spent on lobbying beat Amazon’s total. Since 2012, Amazon has ramped up spending by more than 460 percent—much faster than its rivals.

Sources: Senate Office of Public Record, Bloomberg research

Amazon is also showing a new level of assertiveness in advancing its corporate interests, though largely out of the public eye. The company’s recent high-profile imbroglios, which include the abrupt abandonment of a deal for a new headquarters in New York City and founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos’ blackmail allegations against the National Enquirer, belie the extent and sophistication of the company’s behind-the-scenes efforts. Jay Carney, President Barack Obama’s press secretary and now Amazon’s senior vice president for global corporate affairs, oversees the Washington policy office, whose roster of in-house lobbyists ballooned to 28 in 2018, from 11 in 2015. That doesn’t include the 13 outside lobbying firms Amazon employs. “They realized they’re just getting so big,” says Frank Pasquale, a University of Maryland law professor, of Amazon’s lobbying prowess. “They’re crushing so many small players, they’re recognizing that there’s going to be some political backlash.” One of Amazon’s priorities is to persuade federal agencies to rent Amazon’s vast cloud computing services rather than maintain their own. (Amazon then bids for the work through the federal procurement process.) The company also wants to power a planned, governmentwide e-commerce portal for official purchases of everything from office furniture to paper clips—a $50 billion market.

Old-line computer and software vendors—not to mention retailers that stand to lose business—have begun to chafe at Amazon’s ability to outmaneuver them in Washington. Last year, rivals Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle waged a campaign, at times with the help of trade groups, to unseat Amazon as the front-runner for a $10 billion Pentagon cloud contract, which was supposed to be awarded in April. Amazon was dealt a blow in February when a new conflict-of-interest allegation between Amazon and a former Pentagon employee surfaced in the course of a federal lawsuit brought by Oracle, which wants to prevent the Pentagon from awarding the cloud contract to a single vendor. The alleged conflict forced the Department of Defense to delay the award and possibly even restart the bidding process. A mysterious dossier suggesting that Amazon had gained an edge in the bidding thanks to improper personal relationships even circulated in Washington. (There’s no evidence that Amazon’s tech competitors are behind the dossier.) In letters to the General Services Administration, which oversees government suppliers and buildings, retailers and wholesalers have tried to protect their ability to compete for some of the e-commerce portal deal, which could be even more lucrative than the cloud one. The Retail Industry Leaders Association, which claims to represent 42 million people who work in the retail industry, weighed in. So did Walmart Inc. and Staples Inc., arguing that the government should hire multiple companies, not just one, to create online portals from which federal agencies could order supplies.

Bezos speaks at the Economic Club of Washington on Sept. 13, 2018. PHOTOGRAPHER: ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG

When the Information Technology Alliance for Public Sector (Itaps), a collection of companies that sell hardware and software to the federal government, began publicly criticizing U.S. plans to proceed with the cloud deal and e-commerce portal, Amazon swung into action. In emails and phone calls to Itaps members and staff, Amazon executives tried to stop letters from being sent to members of Congress that portrayed an industry unified in its concerns, according to four people familiar with the matter. One person said the Amazon executives also complained to Dean Garfield, then head of the public sector alliance’s parent organization, the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI). Amazon wasn’t successful, but some tech companies in the Itaps group interpreted Amazon’s actions as an attempt to protect its front-runner status in the federal cloud market, the people familiar said. The tide turned in Amazon’s favor in July, when Garfield disbanded the public sector group and scattered its portfolio of procurement issues among his staff, according to a copy of an email obtained by Bloomberg. Longtime ITI employees who handled the procurement portfolio eventually left amid the reorganization, prompting several companies to worry that Amazon had effectively silenced a trade group. Tensions reached a peak in November, during an ITI board meeting, when Garfield was asked to address members’ suspicions about Amazon’s role in the changes. Garfield, who wouldn’t comment for this article, denied the allegations, according to one person present who wasn’t authorized to discuss internal board matters and asked not to be named.

The ITI board nonetheless elevated Amazon’s vice president for public policy, Brian Huseman, to vice-chair of the executive committee. According to another internal email obtained by Bloomberg, the ITI board also assigned Huseman, along with Adobe Inc.’s vice president for government affairs, to lead the search for an executive director to replace Garfield, who was leaving for a job overseeing global public policy for Netflix Inc. Jennie Courts, an ITI spokeswoman, says the group’s “commitment to public-sector issues, including procurement, and advancing the shared interests of our members remains unchanged. Any inference otherwise is inaccurate.” Amazon went beyond trying to muzzle an uncooperative trade group and launched one of its own. Early last year, Teresa Carlson, the top Amazon Web Services executive in Washington, co-hosted a dinner with two smaller companies to pitch corporate representatives on forming the Alliance for Digital Innovation (ADI), according to two people familiar with the matter. The group’s goal would be to move federal data more quickly to the commercial cloud and encourage the government to adopt emerging technologies. Jack Wilmer, a senior policy adviser in the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, spoke at the dinner about the Trump administration’s plans to modernize the federal government’s technology, a spokeswoman confirmed. Carlson, through a spokesman, declined to comment. Since that dinner, at least 19 cloud-based companies—many of them Amazon business partners—have joined ADI, the new trade group, led by former Amazon Web Services lobbyist Richard Beutel. Notably absent from its membership roster are Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Oracle—Amazon’s biggest Washington competitors. John Wood, CEO of cybersecurity company Telos Corp. and another co-host of the dinner, is the group’s chairman. The goal isn’t to support Amazon in Washington, he says, but to gather like-minded companies that can help the government adopt new technologies. “This is much more than any one organization,” he adds. “ADI is long overdue.” Beutel declined to comment.

The Everything Lobby Issues Amazon has lobbied, by year 2000 2018 2006 2012 Copyright Taxation Computer industry Consumer issues Law enforcement Telecommunications USPS Advertising Trade Agriculture Labor issues Transportation Banking Financial institutions Homeland security Aviation Defense Immigration Intelligence Government 2000 2018 2006 2012 Copyright Taxation Computer industry Consumer issues Law enforcement Telecommunications USPS Advertising Trade Agriculture Labor issues Transportation Banking Financial institutions Homeland security Aviation Defense Immigration Intelligence Government 2000 2018 2006 2012 Copyright Taxation Computer industry Consumer issues Law enforcement Telecommunications USPS Advertising Trade Agriculture Labor issues Transportation Banking Financial institutions Homeland security Aviation Defense Immigration Intelligence Government Sources: Senate Office of Public Record, Bloomberg research

As Amazon looks to build a bigger book of business in Washington, one major irritant has arisen: President Donald Trump. Judging from his tweets, he considers Bezos his biggest corporate nemesis. This could be in part because of Bezos’ personal ownership of the Washington Post, whose news articles often depict a White House in disarray and whose opinion pages relentlessly criticize the president. In July, Trump tweeted that the newspaper was an “expensive lobbyist” for Amazon and that the online retailer had a “huge antitrust” problem. Owning the newspaper has indeed made Bezos’ business affairs more complex, as he wrote in a highly personal Medium blog post published on Feb. 7. In the same post, he alleged that National Enquirer parent company American Media Inc. was threatening to publish embarrassing photos of him, including nude selfies, for political reasons. While they’ve been personally embarrassing for Bezos, neither the scandal nor Trump’s broadsides have done any real damage to Amazon. Yet a new generation of regulators and lawmakers in Washington could. Some openly ponder whether the e-commerce giant is too big and too powerful. “Amazon figures quite prominently in modern debates about U.S. antitrust law,” says William Kovacic, a professor at George Washington University Law School. “In academic articles, they’re often held out as an example of how U.S. antitrust policy has to be more aggressive.”

While the U.S hasn’t challenged Amazon’s business practices, “I have to think some people are thinking about it,” says Amy Webb, founder of the Future Today Institute, which studies technology and the workforce. Amazon has been knocking on the doors of Washington’s antitrust watchdogs. Several company executives—including Huseman and David Zapolsky, Amazon’s general counsel—made visits to the Federal Trade Commission in May, just after the Senate confirmed Trump’s commissioner nominees, according to records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. Such contacts could prove crucial to protecting Amazon’s business as the FTC ramps up its scrutiny of tech companies. Chairman Joe Simons held a series of public hearings last year to examine antitrust policy, including whether technology companies are undermining competition. On Feb. 26 he created a task force to investigate industry mergers that could be unwound if they harm consumers. Facebook Inc.’s 2012 purchase of Instagram is perhaps the most high-profile example of an acquisition that critics argue should never have been approved, but Amazon has done plenty of its own deals, too. Amazon has started hiring well-connected government lawyers and congressional aides, including Bryson Bachman, a former senior counsel to the Department of Justice’s antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim. With numerous House committees now chaired by black Democrats, including those on financial services, education, homeland security, government oversight, and technology, Amazon has also hired a stable of minority lobbyists. These include LaDavia Drane, a former staff chief for Representative Yvette Clarke of New York, a Congressional Black Caucus member, and Troy Clair, who was the chief of staff for Representative G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina, a former CBC chairman. After pressure from the CBC to increase the diversity of its board, Amazon on Feb. 4 added Rosalind Brewer, the chief operating officer of Starbucks Corp. and a former Walmart Inc. executive. Soon Amazon will vastly expand its physical presence in the capital with a new headquarters across the Potomac River. If the company follows through with plans to hire more than 25,000 people, it would become the region’s largest private-sector employer, adding to the 7,500 people who work at an Amazon cloud computing unit near Dulles International Airport. Bezos himself plunked down $23 million for two adjacent properties in the district’s fashionable Kalorama neighborhood in 2016, which he’s now combining into a single mansion to serve as an East Coast base.

Bezos’ Washington, D.C., home. PHOTOGRAPHER: PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP