Mr. Engstrom said he thought the lobbying had an impact, despite the compressed time frame for moving the bill.

“It didn’t foreclose the possibility of lobbying all together,” he said. He added, though, “It was a bit of a scramble, because we didn’t really have a lot of visibility.”

Smaller trade groups have been particularly strained by the rapid pace, lobbyists working on the issue said. Such groups have fewer experts to quickly analyze complex legislative language, fewer lobbyists to try to change provisions that negatively impact their members and smaller budgets for flying in members to plead their cases directly.

“The speed issues really make it tough to educate and mobilize our membership about the nuance on this, when there are a lot of high-profile issues being talked about in the media,” said Ian McTiernan, manager of federal relations for the American Institute of Architects, which has told House and Senate Republicans that their bills contain three provisions that would disproportionately hurt the 90,000 architects represented by the association, according to a letter it sent to members of the Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday. It singled out provisions rolling back tax credits for rehabilitating historic structures and making energy efficient improvements to commercial buildings, and the explicit exclusion of architectural firms from tax breaks extended to other small pass-through corporations.

Lobbyists for more influential interest groups say that their bandwidth is being stretched by other issues gaining legislative traction at the same time as tax reform. For instance, several of the groups trying to protect a valuable mortgage-related tax break — including the National Association of Realtors and the Mortgage Bankers Association — also have an interest in legislation passed by the House on Tuesday to overhaul a federal flood insurance program.

The groups that have had the most success shaping the legislation started long before the bills were unveiled this month.

For instance, the Retail Industry Leaders Association had convened a team of tax experts from the giant retail companies in its membership to help kill a proposed tax on imports earlier this year, and it deployed a similar approach to shaping an excise tax provision in the House bill introduced this month.