Northrop Grumman‘s big lobbying push to get its drone projects funded paid off when Congress reversed the Pentagon’s decision to mothball the Global Hawk fleet and the company was awarded a new contract to build even more of the unmanned vehicles.

In 2012, the defense firm spent more than $17.5 million on lobbying, up nearly $5 million from what it had spent in 2011. That set the company apart from many of its defense contractor cohorts. Lobbying spending by the defense sector as a whole has seen a slight decline since 2011.

In the first quarter of 2013, too, Northrup laid out big bucks — nearly $6 million — though that has tailed off to less than $4 million in each of the two quarters for which reports have been filed since then. But Northrop Grumman is still outspending all of its major rivals in 2013. The company’s PAC has also stepped up its activity. In the 2012 election cycle it spent more than $2.2 million. So far in 2013 it has spent around $1.8 million.

A major focus of the company’s lobbying has been to build lawmakers’ support for specific drone projects the military wants to kill off. For instance, the Pentagon nixed the RQ-4 Global Hawk, an aerial drone Northrup was building for the Air Force, in early 2012 due to budget constraints. In response, the firm went to elected officials on Capitol Hill, said Loren Thompson, chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington-based think tank.

“When the military customer began to doubt its desire for these unmanned systems, Northrop [Grumman] turned to Congress,” Thompson said. “[The company] tried to use congressional leverage as a way to stop those programs from losing their funding.”

The gambit apparently worked.

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But the company’s lobbying efforts were also part of a “PR play” to quell controversy over the Obama administration’s increased use of drones, said Ethan Rosenkranz, a national security policy analyst at the Project on Government Oversight.

“Overall, during the first term, Obama engaged in a massive ramp-up in the use of drones,” he said. But he also noted that Obama has recently started to limit U.S. use of drones, which may be contributing to the decline in Northrup’s lobbying expenditures in recent months.

On the other hand, said the Lexington Institute’s Thompson, the scaled-back demand for military drones — as well as military hardware in general — may spur Northrop Grumman to keep reloading its big guns on the lobbying front into the near future.

“Pentagon demand [for new military technology] continues to soften,” Thompson said. “The payoff from a few million dollars in lobbying can be substantial.”

After all, it’s worked before.

Photo courtesy of Northrop Grumman.



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