DC's Most Active Lobby Firms, 2023/Q3
Last quarter's most active lobby firms
Each week, K Street Analytics publishes a separate analysis of the federal government relations landscape in Washington, analyzing patterns across lobby-filings, PAC activity, and campaign contributions.
In today’s issue, we look the most lobbying-active organizations in 2023/Q3, as well as the busiest lobby firms.
The CliffsNotes version:
There were 2,178 firms who filed in-house lobbying filings
The median and mean expense of in-house filing entities were $90,000 and $241,300 respectively
There were 14,300 firms who filed 17,032 lobbying filings through 1,916 external lobbying firms
The median and mean income of external lobbying firms were $33,234 and $267,000 respectively
The Gini-coefficient of expenses among 2,178 in-house filers was 0.654
The Gini-coefficient of income among 1,916 lobbying firms was 0.768
The top-20 lobbying firms with the highest income were led by Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber, Schreck, which filed around 15 million in quarterly lobbying income
In 2023/Q3, 525,600 million USD in expenses were filed across all 2,178 in-House filing entities.
The 10th and 25th percentile filings were for 0$ and $30,000 respectively
The median and mean expense of in-house filing entities were $90,000 and $241,300 respectively
The 75th and 90th percentile filings were for $234,000 and $520,000 respectively
The highest filing was for 13.6 million, by the chamber of Commerce
To get a visual sense for how top-heavy the distribution of in-House lobbying expenses is, Exhibit 1 cumulates these expenses across in-house filers, ranked by their expenses. One metric we can assign this visual is the Gini-coefficient of expenses.
The Gini-coefficient has a theoretical min of 0, which would occur if each lobby-firm had identical $-filings (leading to a constant linear line in Exhibit 1), and a theoretical max of 1, which would occur if a single firm did all the lobbying, and all other firms with registered in-House lobbyists had zero expenses.
The actual Gini-coefficient of expenses among 2,178 in-house filers was 0.654.
How does this compare to external 1,916 lobbying firms in 2023/Q3?
511,600 million USD in income were filed across all external lobby firms.
The 10th and 25th percentile firms filed for 0$ both
The median and mean income of external lobbying firms were $33,234 and $267,000 respectively
The 75th and 90th percentile filings were for $163,000 and $540,000 respectively
The highest filing was for 14.9 million, by Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, LLP
To get a visual sense for how top-heavy the distribution of in-House lobbying expenses is, Exhibit 2 cumulates these incomes in the same way Exhibit 1 cumulated in-house expenses.
The income distribution in Exhibit 2 appears more right-skewed than the expenses-distribution in Exhibit 1. Indeed, the Gini-coefficient of income among 1,916 lobby-firms was 0.768, considerably higher than the 0.654 Gini-coefficient of expenses among in-house filers in Exhibit 1.
Who were the top lobby-firms that dominated this right-skewed income distribution? Exhibit 3 lists the top-20 lobby-firms by lobbying income filed in 2023/Q3, with the income in thousands of dollars, their quarterly rank, and their average rank over the previous 4 quarters / 12 months (TTM). Additionally, the second columns shows the number of lobbyists that filed under a lobby firm, and the last two columns additionally show the number of clients and that rank by firm.
This concludes our newsletter issue #3 for 2023/Q3.