By Eduardo Bacci — The Investigative Journal
Federal lobbying entered 2026 at a pace that looks, on paper, like a gold rush. Disclosures filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act show the industry closed 2025 at a record $5.08 billion — a 14 percent increase over 2024, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets. First-quarter 2026 filings, due by April 20, are still trickling in, but the early returns suggest the trajectory has not slowed. Clients are paying more, firms are hiring more, and the Trump-aligned shops that rode 2025’s wave are positioning for a second year at the top of the pyramid.
Top-line numbers: a $5 billion industry, and climbing
According to OpenSecrets’ Trends in Spending tracker, 15,768 organizations reported lobbying activity in 2025, up from 14,061 a year earlier — an increase of nearly 12 percent. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce finished the year as the single largest spender at $72.1 million in reported expenditures, overtaking the National Association of Realtors, which had held the top slot for years. The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) reported $38.2 million, up roughly 20 percent year-over-year, while the American Hospital Association disclosed $32 million.
The pharmaceuticals and health products sector, as a whole, spent $451.8 million on federal lobbying in 2025, according to the OpenSecrets industry profile — making it the single largest industry footprint for the year. Filings reviewed by Sludge in August indicated the sector was on pace for a record full-year figure, and Q4 disclosures confirmed that trajectory.
Quarterly data for Q1 2026 will not be fully compiled until the late-April filing deadline passes, but firm-level revenue disclosures and new registrations already indicate that lobbying volume is tracking above the 2025 run-rate.
The Ballard Partners story: from boutique to market leader
No single firm better illustrates the reordering of K Street than Ballard Partners, the Florida-based shop founded by longtime Trump fundraiser Brian Ballard. According to Bloomberg Government and OpenSecrets, Ballard booked more than $88 million in lobbying revenue in 2025 — a jump of more than 350 percent over the prior year — displacing Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck as the highest-grossing firm in Washington.
Ballard’s client ledger, disclosed through LDA filings, expanded by more than 200 new engagements in the months following the November 2024 election. Many of the most lucrative accounts, filings indicate, involved foreign or foreign-linked entities: TikTok, TotalEnergies, Korea Zinc, and Balkan Energy are among the retainers identified in reporting by Sludge drawing on both LDA and FARA filings. The firm’s ascent is consistent with a historically observable pattern — lobbying revenue tends to concentrate in firms with documented access to the sitting administration — but the scale and velocity of this particular shift are notable. Trump-aligned firms have, according to OpenSecrets’ year-end tally, captured a disproportionate share of the 2025 growth.
Right of reply: Ballard Partners has consistently stated that its compliance and disclosure practices meet or exceed federal requirements. No regulatory enforcement action has been identified in public records as of this writing.
The AI-industrial lobby
The other defining storyline of the 2025–2026 cycle is the rapid migration of tech lobbying dollars toward artificial intelligence policy. An Axios analysis of 2025 disclosures found that AI-related line items now dominate the federal lobbying ledgers of the largest technology companies — displacing, in share of total spend, the social-media and data-privacy fights of the last decade.
Filings reviewed for this report, and summarized by The Batch, show Amazon disclosing $17.89 million, Alphabet $13.10 million, and Microsoft $9.36 million in 2025 federal lobbying outlays. Nvidia’s reported spend grew to $4.9 million — roughly seven times its 2024 figure, per the same summary of LDA filings. OpenAI disclosed just under $3 million for the year, up from $1.76 million in 2024, with more than $1 million booked in the fourth quarter alone for issues identified in filings as “data centers and small business competitiveness” and “cloud computing and infrastructure,” according to coverage by Bloomberg Government.
The policy battles behind those numbers are unusually consequential. Reporting in The Meridiem this month describes an industry push for federal liability shields for foundation-model developers, and a parallel effort — documented in testimony before Illinois lawmakers — to preempt state-level AI regulation. Data-center siting, energy delivery, and export controls round out the top disclosed issues. Records filed by Bloom Energy and other power-infrastructure firms indicate a coordinated effort to frame grid buildout as a component of AI competitiveness.
Revolving door: cooling-off periods meet a hot market
OpenSecrets’ Revolving Door database currently tracks 466 former members of Congress in lobbying or advisory roles across the influence industry. The migration of former executive-branch officials is more difficult to measure in real time because LDA filings do not always identify prior government employment, but filings from Q4 2025 and early Q1 2026 continue to show new registrations naming individuals with recent federal service. Records indicate that statutory cooling-off periods under 18 U.S.C. § 207 — one year for most senior officials, two years for very senior officials, and a lifetime ban on switching sides on the same particular matter — remain the primary federal constraint.
Legislation to tighten those rules is again pending. H.R. 3554, the Close the Revolving Door Act of 2025, would impose a lifetime ban on former Members of Congress lobbying Congress and require larger lobbying entities to file an annual roster of former Senators and Representatives on staff. The bill has not advanced out of committee. Its prospects, based on current committee activity, remain uncertain.
FARA: foreign influence filings continue to climb
The Justice Department’s FARA filings portal shows continued growth in new registrations from agents working on behalf of foreign principals. A Congressional Research Service in-focus brief dated March 9, 2026, produced in partnership with graduate researchers at the Bush School at Texas A&M, summarizes the structure of recent FARA registrations and enforcement activity. The brief notes that proposed FARA rule amendments published in the Federal Register in January 2025 — which would clarify the scope of the “commercial exemption” and define key terms such as “agent” and “political activities” — have not been finalized.
As a matter of public record, FARA enforcement has cooled relative to the 2017–2022 peak, with fewer criminal referrals announced by DOJ’s National Security Division. Civil compliance activity, by contrast, remains active, and advisory opinions issued through the FARA Unit continue to shape how firms characterize their foreign-principal work. Filings suggest that firms with Trump-era access, Ballard among them, have absorbed a growing share of foreign-client work — a pattern that warrants continued monitoring, particularly where the underlying principals are state-owned enterprises or politically exposed persons.
Industry-by-industry: where the money moved
Several cross-cutting patterns emerge from the 2025 year-end and early 2026 filings. Pharmaceuticals and health products, as noted, led all industries in absolute spend. Securities and investment, real estate, and electronics manufacturing and equipment — the latter driven largely by AI-related hardware interests — all posted double-digit percentage growth, according to OpenSecrets’ industry breakdowns. Oil and gas spending rose as well, consistent with pending regulatory debates over permitting reform, LNG export licensing, and methane rules.
Crypto and digital-asset firms, whose reported spend accelerated sharply during 2024, maintained elevated expenditure levels in 2025 as Congress worked through market-structure and stablecoin legislation. Filings indicate that several of the largest exchanges and trade associations retained Trump-aligned firms for the first time during the reporting period.
Foreign-government-adjacent spending is more difficult to categorize under the LDA because much of it is reported instead under FARA. Cross-referencing the two databases — as OpenSecrets’ Foreign Lobby Watch does — suggests that the total influence footprint of foreign-linked principals is materially larger than either database shows in isolation.
Think tanks and the soft-influence layer
Think-tank funding disclosures remain voluntary and inconsistent. Where annual reports do list donors, records indicate continued six- and seven-figure contributions from corporations with active lobbying agendas on overlapping issues — particularly in the areas of AI governance, energy policy, and trade. The soft-influence layer is difficult to quantify with the same precision as LDA disclosures, but filings and annual reports from the last twelve months indicate that several Washington policy shops have expanded programming around AI regulation, semiconductor policy, and data-center infrastructure — the same issue set now dominating the corporate lobbying agenda. TIJ will continue to track cases where donor lists and lobbying agendas overlap in ways that public records can substantiate.
What warrants deeper investigation
Four influence networks, based on the public record, merit sustained TIJ attention in the months ahead. First, the Ballard Partners client portfolio and its intersections with FARA-registered foreign principals — particularly Balkan Energy, Korea Zinc, and TikTok — where LDA and FARA filings together provide a fuller picture than either does alone. Second, the AI liability-shield campaign, where corporate filings, state-level testimony, and federal issue-area disclosures appear to describe a coordinated preemption strategy. Third, the data-center siting and energy-delivery lobby, which now links technology, utility, and fossil-fuel interests into a common advocacy coalition. Fourth, the post-election migration of former executive-branch officials into firms representing regulated industries, where statutory cooling-off windows will expire throughout 2026 and 2027.
None of the above should be read as an allegation of wrongdoing. Every claim in this report is drawn from public filings, on-the-record reporting, or official databases, each linked in the text. Firms and principals named here are entitled to respond; TIJ will update this article with any substantive reply received through the contact channels listed at tij.news.
Methodology
This report draws on LDA filings aggregated by OpenSecrets, FARA filings available through the DOJ FARA e-File portal, and supplementary reporting from Bloomberg Government, Axios, Sludge, and MIT Technology Review. Q1 2026 figures reflect filings and firm-level disclosures available as of April 14, 2026; the statutory LDA quarterly deadline falls on April 20, and final industry aggregates will shift modestly once all filings are processed. Dollar figures are as-reported; OpenSecrets cautions that reported totals may undercount in-house and grassroots spending that does not meet LDA reporting thresholds.
Eduardo Bacci is an investigative journalist and editor at The Investigative Journal. Tips: editorial@tij.news.