President Donald Trump promised to drain the swamp. Instead, it’s filling up.

For the first time since 2007, the number of registered lobbyists along with federal lobbying spending each went up, reversing annual declines that began a decade ago.

In all, $3.37 billion was spent on federal lobbying last year, up 7 percent from $3.15 billion in 2016. The increase comes after declines in spending five of the previous six years, rising less than 1 percent the other year.

The 7-percent gain is the largest year-to-year bump since former President George W. Bush’s final year in office in 2008. A crackdown on lobbyists by the Obama administration curtailed years of free spending, which rose from $1.6 billion in 2000 to a record $3.5 billion in 2010.

Until 2017, the number of registered lobbyists had dropped each of the past 10 years, from a record high of 14,827 in 2007 to a 20-year low of 11,169 in 2016.

Last year, 11,444 registered lobbyists appeared in quarterly reports filed with Congress. The reports include basic information on spending, issues and entities lobbied, usually with vague language and broad strokes.

A fourth-quarter report by Kevin Kayes of QGA Public Affairs, for instance, said the firm was paid $37,500 by U.S. Steel to lobby on “trade law enforcement.” The audience was “U.S. Senate, U.S. House of Representatives.”

Based on the report – typical for most filings – the members of Congress who were lobbied by the firm is obscured from public scrutiny.

Did one of the partners grab a bullhorn and yell from the Senate gallery? Or was there a luncheon with, say, Florida House Republican Ron DeSantis, a lawmaker who listed U.S. Steel stock as an asset on his 2016 financial disclosure?

The final tally of registered lobbyists from 2017 will likely rise.

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Fourth quarter lobbying reports were due to Congress by Jan. 22, but about 8 percent of lobbyists who had filed during the previous three quarters of 2017 did so after the filing deadline passed – without explanation or consequence.

In the first three quarters of 2017, a combined 6,590 reports — or nearly 1 in 10 — were filed after the quarterly deadline, often weeks after news stories discussed the ongoing decline in quarterly lobbying in Trump’s Washington (our stories included).

Not all the late filings were standard quarterly reports, however. Some were amendments or terminations; others were submitted to show no activity at all.

Two perennial giants of federal lobbying spending — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and National Association of Realtors — again topped the list of big spenders, despite declines from last year.





The Chamber ($82 million) and Realtors ($56 million) dropped a combined $138 million during a year in which Congress passed a tax overhaul that impacts both the financial and real estate industries. In 2016, the Chamber ($104 million) and the Realtors ($65 million) spent about $169 million.

The Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs, spent nearly twice as much on lobbying in 2017 than 2016 — not surprising since cutting the corporate tax rate was central to the GOP tax rewrite. The CEO group spent a record $27 million last year compared to $16 million the previous year.

As The Washington Post reported earlier this week, Google spent more on federal lobbying last year ($18 million) than any other U.S. company. That was a first for a tech company.

As expected, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed into law last month received the lion’s share of lobbying interest. Nearly 1,400 organizations lobbied for or against the bill — or more than double what groups had allocated over the fate of the Affordable Care Act.



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