Federal lobbying opened 2026 at a record pace, with $1.4 billion spent in the first quarter alone — the highest first-quarter total since modern disclosure began — on the heels of an unprecedented $5.08 billion in 2025. The data, drawn from public filings, shows an influence economy increasingly organized around firms with direct ties to the White House.
Washington’s influence industry is not merely growing; it is breaking its own records. According to an OpenSecrets analysis of federal lobbying reports, organizations spent roughly $1.4 billion lobbying the federal government in the first quarter of 2026 — the largest first-quarter figure since Congress began requiring quarterly disclosures in 2008. A total of 13,521 organizations reported activity, collectively increasing their outlays by about $115 million, or roughly 9%, over the same period in 2025.
That surge builds on a watershed year. Lobbying activity surpassed $5 billion for the first time in 2025, reaching $5.08 billion — up 14% in nominal terms and 11% after inflation, the steepest increases since quarterly reporting began. The number of organizations filing disclosures climbed nearly 12%, to 15,768. The figures describe a marketplace in which corporations, trade groups and foreign interests are spending more than ever to shape policy in the second Trump term. Lobbying is a lawful, constitutionally protected activity, and the disclosures cited here reflect that system of transparency working as designed; what the records reveal is where the money is flowing, and to whom.
K Street’s Trump-aligned boom
The clearest pattern in the data is the rise of lobbying shops with close ties to the current administration. Ballard Partners — founded by Brian Ballard, who chaired the Trump Victory PAC in 2016 and 2017 — became the first firm ever to clear $30 million in a single quarter, extending a lead it first seized in 2025 when it booked a record $88.1 million, roughly 3.5 times its 2024 revenue. OpenSecrets reports that several former Ballard lobbyists now hold senior administration posts, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles; the firm’s filings list clients such as Palantir, Anthropic, TikTok and UnitedHealth Group. In the first quarter, records indicate, Ballard’s most lucrative client was Cyprus-based Nerobreeze Ltd., which paid $750,000 to lobby on investment and transparency issues.
BGR Group, led by former Trump campaign adviser David Urban, reported $20.8 million in first-quarter revenue, a year-over-year increase of more than 42%; it finished 2025 at $71.5 million, up 59%. Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, long the industry’s revenue leader before Ballard overtook it, posted $20.3 million. The most striking trajectory belongs to Checkmate Government Relations, a small shop led by Ches McDowell that reported just $70,000 in its first disclosure at the end of 2024, finished 2025 with $22.2 million, and booked $11 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone — an increase of more than 1,100% over the prior year. Filings show Checkmate’s roster includes the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, the Sports Betting Alliance and pharmaceutical firms, alongside Kuala Lumpur-based Innovaire & Co., which paid the firm $1 million.
These firms operate lawfully and would describe their growth as the product of expertise and access common to every administration. The disclosures nonetheless map an influence network worth watching: the data shows that proximity to power, as much as policy specialization, is now a leading driver of revenue on K Street.
Where the money concentrates
Among individual spenders, familiar institutions still dominate. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was the single largest lobbying spender in 2025 at $72.1 million, even as that figure fell about 6% from 2024. The National Association of Realtors spent $54.4 million for the year — down 37% — but roared back in early 2026, reporting $15.5 million in the first quarter, 38% more than a year earlier. Health care organizations accounted for four of the ten largest spenders in 2025: the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America spent $38.2 million, the American Hospital Association $32 million, and the Business Roundtable posted the largest jump among top spenders, rising more than 40% to $33.5 million.
At the sector level, health care led all industries with a record $868 million in 2025, followed by the finance, insurance and real estate sector at $711 million and a defense sector that allocated $191 million, with Lockheed Martin alone spending $15.7 million. The single fastest-growing first-quarter spender was C.H. Robinson Worldwide, the nation’s largest freight broker, which multiplied its lobbying more than 28-fold to $2.3 million as it litigates a Supreme Court case over broker liability — a vivid example of how a pending legal question can translate directly into lobbying dollars.
TrumpRx and the pharmaceutical surge
One of the most concrete money-and-policy linkages identified this year involves the administration’s drug-pricing initiative. According to OpenSecrets research, the 17 drug companies anchoring the TrumpRx program spent roughly $130 million on lobbying in 2025 — a 23% surge that outpaced the broader industry and accounted for more than a quarter of the record $457.3 million the pharmaceutical and health-products industry spent that year. Fifteen of the 17 increased their year-over-year totals. The reporting notes the surge coincided with the administration granting participating drugmakers multi-year exemptions from new import tariffs in exchange for offering “most favored nation” prices to cash-paying customers. Industry lobbying showed no sign of slowing in early 2026, topping $131 million in the first quarter.
The revolving door spins faster
The movement of personnel between government and the influence industry remains a defining feature of Washington. The OpenSecrets revolving-door database catalogs hundreds of former members of Congress now working in or around lobbying. In a report dated April 2, 2026, the Campaign Legal Center identified at least 47 former lobbyists nominated for or serving as senior political appointees, more than 15 of whom, it argued, would have been barred or limited under the ethics pledges of the previous three administrations. The group cited the case of Kyle Kunkler, who lobbied the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of the American Soybean Association regarding the pesticide dicamba shortly before his appointment to a senior pesticide-programs role at the EPA.
Scrutiny has come from Capitol Hill as well: in February 2026, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other lawmakers wrote to 16 inspectors general raising conflict-of-interest concerns about former lobbyists serving in the administration. The revolving door turns in both directions and across both parties — former BGR personnel and others have moved into government, and officials routinely depart for the private sector — and legislative responses are pending, including the Close the Revolving Door Act of 2025. These are allegations and policy disputes, not findings of wrongdoing; the appointees named have not been charged with any offense, and the practice itself is legal.
Foreign influence and the FARA frontier
Foreign-principal activity surfaced repeatedly in this year’s filings. Records reviewed by OpenSecrets show BGR Group received $240,000 from the law firm Skadden, Arps to represent CANPACK Group after the Russian government seized the company’s subsidiaries, and the firm’s 2025 client list included the Government of India. A separate Global Witness investigation reported that BGR signed contracts with foreign governments affected by U.S. aid cuts. Checkmate’s representation of Binance drew particular attention: filings indicate the exchange paid the firm $450,000 for roughly a month of White House lobbying in late 2025 on issues including cryptocurrency and “executive relief.” Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who pleaded guilty in 2023 to enabling money laundering, was pardoned in October — a lawful exercise of the executive’s constitutional clemency power, though the timing relative to the lobbying engagement is documented in the public record.
Transparency advocates note that much foreign influence still escapes disclosure. The Department of Justice maintains the FARA registration database, and OpenSecrets tracks filings through its Foreign Lobby Watch, but think tanks and nonprofits face no equivalent requirement. The Senate has advanced bills to broaden foreign-agent disclosure within lobbying reports, while the proposed Think Tank and Nonprofit Foreign Influence Disclosure Act would require tax-exempt organizations to disclose foreign-government gifts exceeding $50,000 — a gap that has allowed policy-shaping institutions to accept overseas funding without public accounting.
Tech, surveillance and federal contracts
A fast-growing node of the influence economy sits at the intersection of technology, surveillance and immigration enforcement. An OpenSecrets review found that Palantir, Axon Enterprise and Parsons Corporation — all holders of Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts — increased their combined lobbying by 194% between 2020 and 2025. Palantir, which received a $30 million award to develop an enforcement data system, reported $4.44 million in lobbying in 2025 and nearly $2 million more in early 2026. Parsons reported $1.3 million in lobbying touching border-security issues while holding a multimillion-dollar Department of Homeland Security contract. The pattern — rising lobbying alongside rising federal contract awards — is precisely the kind of feedback loop disclosure laws were designed to expose.
The legislative battlefield
Federal budget and appropriations remained the most heavily lobbied issue area in both 2025 and early 2026. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed in July 2025, was the most-lobbied single measure of 2025, drawing activity from 2,354 organizations; Blue Cross Blue Shield cited it 64 times in its disclosures, more than any other filer. Even after passage, it remained the most-referenced law in early 2026 as industries jockeyed over implementation. Trade lobbying climbed 24% year-over-year amid the administration’s tariff agenda, and defense activity rose about 10% against a backdrop of heightened geopolitical tension, OpenSecrets reported. Newer fights are drawing concentrated money as well, including the SPEED Act, which would narrow environmental reviews to accelerate permitting; the Farm, Food, and National Security Act of 2026; and the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, which cleared the Senate in March.
Influence networks that warrant deeper investigation
Several threads in the data merit sustained TIJ reporting in the months ahead. The first is the Ballard–Checkmate axis: the concentration of revenue in a handful of firms whose principals and alumni populate the administration raises questions, answerable only through filing-by-filing tracing, about whether access is being monetized faster than disclosure can illuminate. The second is the contract-to-lobbying loop among federal vendors such as Palantir and Parsons, where public money and influence spending move in tandem. The third is the foreign-funding blind spot — the gap between FARA-registered lobbying and the unregulated flow of overseas money into think tanks and nonprofits that shape elite opinion. Each can be pursued through the public record: the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act database, the DOJ’s FARA filings, and OpenSecrets’ aggregated analyses.
The numbers tell an unambiguous story of an influence industry at record scale. The harder questions — who benefits, which decisions move, and where disclosure ends and secrecy begins — are the ones accountability journalism must keep asking.
Methodology and right of reply: All figures in this report are drawn from public disclosures filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act and the Foreign Agents Registration Act and from OpenSecrets’ published analyses of those filings. Lobbying and the engagements described are lawful activities; no individual or firm named here was accused of a crime in the records reviewed, and pending bills and advocacy claims are identified as such. The Investigative Journal welcomes responses from any party named in this report and will update it to reflect substantive corrections.