Watching the government

Five ways to watch Congress

Tracking Lobbying in Congress.

Bills

What Congress votes on, in plain language, and when a yes bundled unrelated measures together.

Trading

The stocks members trade, including in the industries their own committees oversee.

Financing

Who funds each member's campaigns, the money behind the vote.

Lobbying

Who pays to work the bills, the firms that file the work, and whose desks that money reaches.

Grade

One letter per member: their funding, their trading, and how they back their own voters.

Lobbying firms file which bills they work on, and they file their own political giving. We join the two and follow that money to the committee that decides each bill, measured against that room's ordinary share of it all, so a big bill and a bill that drew unusual money never look the same.

The pool

Filings through the third quarter of 2026, a quarter still inside its own filing window.

$348,068,406

The political giving of the lobbying organizations themselves, filed under their own names. Never fees, never client money.

7 of 8 LD-2 quarters are pulled (not yet held: the fourth quarter of 2026), and the third quarter of 2026 is still inside its filing window, so it holds a fraction of what it will hold. 3 of 4 LD-203 periods carry a filed report; 2026 year end holds 10 rows, which is a period whose reports are not due yet and never a period in which lobbyists gave nothing. The two Congresses are filed on different calendars, so no figure on this page is set against the other one.

To Republicans

$202,761,131

To Democrats

$144,816,250

Organizations in the pool

1,828

Bills named in filings

10,688

Find a member

Dollars run on a square root scale, so the hundreds of members packed near the low end stay readable. Hollow dots received none on record.

Hover or tap any dot, search a name, or enter a ZIP to see that member's card here.

The biggest single flow

$13,968,239

from the firms that named HR 1 to the House Committee on the Budget, level with that committee's ordinary share of all lobbyist giving, so what is large here is the bill and not the concentration.

The largest giver's share

0.93%

of the whole pool comes from AICPA Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. No organization on the board holds a larger share than that one.

Members reached

All but 2

Reaching 272 of 274 Republicans, all 260 Democrats and all 3 Independents on record.

How these three are measured

A bill counts as measured once 5 or more firms named it in a filing and their matched giving reaches $250,000; smaller bills are left out rather than shown as zero. A flow is the giving of the firms that named one bill, set against the ordinary share of all lobbyist money that committee sees, so it is a concentration and never dollars attached to a bill. It is ONE bill and ONE committee of referral. The filings table at the foot of this page leads with whole bills instead: every committee a bill was referred to at once, which is why its top figure is a larger number of a different kind. The pair above sits inside that bill's row. A share of the pool is one organization's own political money against every organization's, both filed under their own names. A member with nothing on record is a filing state and not a finding: the board carries every sitting member and delegate.

The paying side

The payers

Who buys lobbying in the first place, taken across every client on record for the year: how much of it is business, how much is labor, and which sectors spend the most.

Who hires the lobby

Companies, unions, and everyone else

All federal lobbying spend reported for 2025, every client on record, a different pool of money from the giving above. $6.24B in all.

From business

$5.18B

83.1% of the total

From labor unions

$66.9M

1.1% of the total

The biggest sectors

Health & Pharma3,790 clients$1.21B
Tech & Telecom3,079 clients$907.6M
Finance & Insurance1,873 clients$624.1M
Energy & Utilities1,796 clients$511.7M
Manufacturing & Industrial2,037 clients$450.0M

1 to 5 of 15

Not yet classified5,599 clients$979.1M

What this measures

Business here means companies and business groups together, every sector except labor, advocacy and the unclassified residue. This is what clients paid to lobby across 2025, a different disclosure system from the pool above, which is the political giving of the lobbying organizations themselves. The two are never added together. Advocacy is 2 sectors of the list above, Leadership & Ideological and Pro-Israel, and they account for $6.6M between them; none of that is inside the business figure. Not yet classified is the spend our sector rules did not reach; it includes cross-industry federations such as the Chamber of Commerce, which have no single sector to wear. The count under each row is how many clients filed that spend, which is what separates a sector of a few giants from a sector of many payers.

The receiving side

The receivers

The members that giving reached, ranked inside their own party rather than against each other and never across the aisle. Every sitting member and delegate is on the board.

Democrats

1 to 5 of 260

Republicans

1 to 5 of 274

The 3 Independents: Kiley $270K, King $201K, Sanders $20K. Their dots sit in the chart above and their dollars in the pool.

How to read this board

Every sitting member appears, ranked inside their own party against one money pool. It tracks power rather than a party: leadership and the committee chairs lead in both. A member with nothing on record is a filing state, not a finding.

The firms and the clients

Who does the lobbying, and who pays for it

The firms are the lobbying operations that file the work, in-house teams and hired firms alike, and their own political giving is the pool this page follows. The clients are the organizations that pay them to work the bills. What a client pays is a separate disclosure, and the two are never added together.

The firms

Whose giving this is

1AICPA Association of International Certified Professional Accountants11 bills named$3.2M
2K&L Gates, LLP113 bills named$3.1M
3State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company6 bills named$3.0M
4American Bankers Association84 bills named$2.9M
5Honeywell International32 bills named$2.7M

1 to 5 of 25

How this board counts

The board holds the 25 organizations with the most giving on record. One organization counted once, however many bills it named. The bar under each row is that firm against the largest on the board.

The clients

Who hires the firms

Order

1Chamber of Commerce of the U.S.A.351 measured bills$70.3M
2National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners157 measured bills$96K
3AFL-CIO153 measured bills$3.4M
4American Medical Association138 measured bills$24.1M
5AARP, Inc.127 measured bills$22.3M

1 to 5 of 100

What the money column is

The board holds the 100 clients that hired lobbyists on the most measured bills, ordered by that count or by their lobby spend, whichever is selected. The money is what that client paid to lobby across 2025, all issues combined, from its own LD-2 filings. It is a different disclosure from the pool this page follows and the two are never added together.

The filings

Where a payer and a receiver share a page

A lobbying filing names the bills it covers. That filing is the one document both sides of the spread appear in together, so it is where this ledger closes. The filings name 10,688 bills in all, and the 1,860 below are the ones that clear this page's own bar for measurement. One row per bill, led by every committee it was referred to at once, with the rooms behind it a tap away.

Start here: big money, far above the committee's ordinary share

Find a bill

Order

Chamber

Committee

Scope

119th Congress

20 bills (loading all 2,521 bill and committee pairs…) · one row per bill, totalled across its committees of referral with every member counted once

1 to 5 of 20

What this is not

Not a list of positions. The filings carry no support or oppose field. A firm on a bill may want it passed, killed, or amended.
Not proof of influence. A flow shows that firms' giving reached a committee's members, not that the money changed a vote.
Not per-bill dollars. The giving spans the whole period and is never attached to any one measure. No number here is what a bill cost.
Not client spend. What a client pays its lobbyists and what a firm gives to members are two different disclosures, never added together.
Not a total. A firm reaches a bill only by naming it in free text, so every count is a floor, and a bill with no row has not been shown to be unlobbied.
Not resolved entities. Names are as the filer typed them. One firm can appear under several spellings, and counting names is counting strings.

Sources: Senate Office of Public Records LD-2 quarterly activity reports and LD-203 contribution reports; committee of referral from the Library of Congress bill status records; committee rosters and the sitting member list from this site's own data. Bills with fewer than 5 filing registrants, or under $250,000 of matched giving, are not measured. Generated September 2, 2026. For who funds each member's campaigns, see Financing.