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Project Curia

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

All 8 quarters of lobbying filings and all 4 giving periods of this Congress are in.

$421,226,681

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

All 8 LD-2 quarters and all 4 LD-203 periods of this Congress have been filed and pulled, so nothing here is waiting on a filing deadline. The two Congresses are filed on different calendars, so no figure on this page is set against the other one.

To Republicans

$223,754,467

To Democrats

$194,348,159

Organizations in the pool

1,882

Bills named in filings

11,643

Age20406080100$0$250K$1M$2M$4MLeast bill moneyMost bill money

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. Height is age at the close of the 118th Congress, the same date for everyone. 19 members whose service ended before that day have no age on record here, so they sit on the board below and not in this chart.

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

The biggest single flow

$19,229,707

from the firms that named HR 7024 to the House Committee on Ways and Means, 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

1.0%

of the whole pool comes from American Hospital Association. No organization on the board holds a larger share than that one.

Members reached

All but 10

Reaching 275 of 280 Republicans, 265 of 270 Democrats and all 4 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 everyone who sat in the 118th Congress.

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 2024, every client on record, a different pool of money from the giving above. $5.30B in all.

From business

$3.62B

68.3% of the total

From labor unions

$57.2M

1.1% of the total

The biggest sectors

  1. Health & Pharma3,166 clients$924.4M
  2. Tech & Telecom2,476 clients$672.8M
  3. Finance & Insurance1,495 clients$443.1M
  4. Energy & Utilities1,369 clients$387.3M
  5. Manufacturing & Industrial1,360 clients$278.3M
1 to 5 of 15
Not yet classified7,041 clients$1.62B
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 2024, 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 $5.5M 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. Everyone who sat in the 118th Congress is on the board.

Democrats
  1. 1Robert P. Casey, Jr.PA · Senate$3.6M
  2. 2Hakeem S. JeffriesNY · House$3.5M
  3. 3Jon TesterMT · Senate$3.4M
  4. 4Katherine M. ClarkMA · House$2.9M
  5. 5Pete AguilarCA · House$2.9M
1 to 5 of 270
Republicans
  1. 1Jason SmithMO · House$4.1M
  2. 2Mike JohnsonLA · House$3.8M
  3. 3Steve ScaliseLA · House$3.5M
  4. 4Tom EmmerMN · House$3.3M
  5. 5John BarrassoWY · Senate$3.0M
1 to 5 of 280

The 4 Independents: Sinema $1.4M, King $1.3M, Manchin $397K, Sanders $92K. Their dots sit in the chart above and their dollars in the pool.

How to read this board
Everyone who sat in the 118th Congress 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

  1. 1American Hospital Association80 bills named$4.2M
  2. 2National Association of Realtors43 bills named$3.9M
  3. 3K&L Gates, LLP98 bills named$3.5M
  4. 4American Israel Public Affairs Committee57 bills named$3.4M
  5. 5National Beer Wholesalers Association24 bills named$3.4M
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
  1. 1Chamber of Commerce of the U.S.A.407 measured bills$74.5M
  2. 2American Medical Association180 measured bills$24.3M
  3. 3AARP179 measured bills$19.9M
  4. 4National Treasury Employees Union158 measured bills-
  5. 5National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners152 measured bills-
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 2024, 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. A bare hyphen means no 2024 spend matched this client name. 32 of the 100 names here matched one, so most of this column is hyphens: the 2024 rollup prices the year's biggest hirers rather than every client on record.

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 11,643 bills in all, and the 2,182 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

Order
Chamber
Committee
Scope
118th Congress

16 bills (loading all 3,038 bill and committee pairs…) · one row per bill, totalled across its committees of referral with every member counted once

1 to 5 of 16

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 member list for the 118th Congress from this site's own data. The roster is everyone who sat in the 118th Congress, party as of their last day in it, and every age on the chart is age at the close of the 118th Congress. 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.