Have you ever wondered how many of Washington’s thousands of lobbyists weighed in on a controversial bill, like the Affordable Care Act? Before today, there was no practical way to answer that question.

Now, though, OpenSecrets.org can provide the answer. We’ve expanded our lobbying disclosure resources to show connections between lobbyists and bills, issues, and the agencies they target when lobbying. Now, we can show which lobbyists specialize in issues like health care or financial reform, as well as which federal agencies receive the most attention from lobbyists.

This information has always been filed by the firms employing lobbyists, but a peculiarity in the data structure has prevented any meaningful analysis of how many lobbyists are targeting any issue at a given time. Lobbying firms and organizations that lobby on their own behalf are required to file quarterly reports describing their activities with the House and Senate separately. These filings include basic information about how much money was spent by the organization in that quarter, but they also list individual lobbyists and the bills and issues they targeted.

While these forms are identical, the data produced by the House and Senate is not. OpenSecrets.org primarily collects data from the Senate, but this data only allows users to tell which lobbyists worked for which organization, and which issues and bills the organization as a whole lobbied on. For example, 169 lobbyists have represented the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its subsidiaries so far in 2013, and those 169 lobbyists focused on 46 distinct issues. But, the Senate data provides no information connecting individual lobbyists with specific issues. The House data does allow users to make those connections, and we now provide that on OpenSecrets.org.

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“Bill” and “Issue” pages now include a “Lobbyists” tab that lists individuals who reported lobbying on that piece of legislation or issue. Users can now see which bills were the most heavily targeted by lobbyists, who those lobbyists were, and who received campaign contributions from those lobbyists.

We also added “Bill” and “Issue” tabs to our lobbyist profiles, so that you can see the bills targeted by those lobbyists, as well as the issues the lobbyists most frequently discuss with members of Congress or the federal government. And the “Expertise” tab of our revolving door profiles now includes issues a lobbyist has worked on.

More improvements are coming soon using this new data.



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