K Street's most lobbied issues in Q3
most lobbied-on issues and keywords
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 at the subjects that were most lobbied on in 2023/Q3. To get a fine-grained view, we use machine-learning techniques to extract the most important key issues from lobby-filings, and characterize them by dollar-spent.
The CliffsNotes version:
There are 79 “canned” subjects-matters, from which each quarterly lobby-filing needs to select at least one.
The subject-matters “Fed Budget & Appropriations”, “Health Issues,” and “Taxes” contain the most filings in Q3, with 4,411, 2,994 and 2,586 respectively.
By disassembling lobby-filings into filing-subject tuples, and re-assembling them to the subject-level, we can assign money-values to how much lobbying occurred on each subject
The three highest ranking subjects are unchanged whether ranked by filings or money spent, but outside the top-three the rankings by money and filing are quite different.
We use machine-learning techniques to extract the most important key issues from the text descriptions of lobby-filings. This generates about 1,400 key-issues, i.e. a much more fine-grained measure than the 79 canned subjects
By disassembling filings into filing-subject-issue triples, and re-assembling them to the issue-level, we can assign money-values to how much lobbying occurred on each key-issue. The top-120 key issues explain 50% of quarterly lobby-spending, i.e. north of 500 million USD.
There is a steep tail: last quarter’s most lobbied key-issue, “Fiscal Year 24 Defense Appropriations”, had 108 million USD devoted to it, roughly 9.4% of total lobbying spend.
The simplest way to measure the extent of lobbying by subject-matter is to count up, for each subject-matter, the filings that mention it. The top-ranked subjects on this metric are listed in Exhibit 1, with Fed Budget & Appropriations, Health Issues, Taxes, Defense and Medicare/Medicaid making up the top-five.
A better metric for gauging a subject-matter’s importance is to assign dollar-values to it. To do this, we divide each filing’s aggregate income and expenditures across its listed subject-matters, based on the number of lobbyists that are filed as having worked on each subject-matter (the number of lobbyists across subjects can vary substantially within filings), and then total it back up by subject matter. In short, we disassemble the filing-level dollar-amounts into filing-subject components, and then reassemble them into subject-level amounts. This method assigns more weight to subjects that occur in filings with higher lobbying-expenses, or that have more lobbyists working on them. Exhibit 2 shows the correlation between the 79 subject-matters’ filing-rank (Frank) and money-rank (Mrank). The correlation is high, but far from perfect. Observations below the 45-degree line have relatively higher monetary attention devoted to it (because the highest rank is 1 in the bottom-left corner).
Subjects may be below the line because lobbying on them entails large expenses, or because there is relatively few organizations that lobby on a subject (meaning fewer filings) but those that do lobby on them do so intensely. In the exhibit, we label two such example subject-matters.
Exhibit 3 shows the top-ranked subject-matters by lobby money spent (income plus expenses), rather than by filings. The top-ranked, Health Issues, is second by filings (last columns), and accounts for 111.5 million USD in lobby-spend, almost 10% of the total. (MrankTTM shows average Mrank over the previous four quarters.)
The 79 canned subject-matters are interesting but fairly limited in how much insight they can provide. They also do not vary much quarter-to-quarter in the their relative importance.
To obtain more precise and detailed insights into what issues really drive lobbying, we leverage machine-learning algorithms applied to the detailed text descriptions of lobby filings.
Lobby-filings contain a separate detailed text description for each subject-matter contained in a filing. We concatenate all text-descriptions by subject-matter (from filing-subject tuples) to create 79 text corpora (one for each subject) and use machine-learning algorithms to extract the key-issues that drove lobbying under each subject. These key-issues include bills, bill amendments, proposals, initiatives etc.
By disassembling filings into filing-to-issue tuples, and re-assembling these tuples to the level of issues, we can find the most important key-issues, and assign them money-estimates of how much lobbying occurred on each key-issue.
This procedure generates almost 1,400 key-issues, thus providing a much finer-grained view than the 79 canned subject-matters. However, the key-issues are heavily right-skewed in terms of how important they were overall, as a function of their ML-generated centrality score and whether they were a key issue for an important or unimportant subject (the multiplier).
Exhibit 4 shows that the vast majority of the key-issues carry relatively little overall economic weight. The top-120 issues (vertical line), however, received 50% of lobbying-attention.
Exhibit 5 shows money spent (income + expenses) on the top-25 key-issues, with a breakdown of the subject-matter text-corpora under which they appeared: “Fiscal Year 2024 Defense Appropriations” plus “National Defense Authorization Act” for example, are last quarter’s two most lobbied-on key-issue, with 108.4 million USD devoted to them, roughly 9.4% of total lobbying-spend. They appear as a key-issue under the text-corpora of five subject-matters: Fed Budget & Appropriations, Defense, Intelligence, Aerospace, and Disaster & Emergency Planning.
Almost 10% of all lobbying efforts going to one key-issue seems like a lot. However, it looks very reasonable when considering that roughly two-thirds of all procurement spending goes through the DoD, and federal procurement is worth 600 billion a year. This means the Defense Appropriations/Authorization Act (DAA) is regularly the most lobbied-on recurring bill.
Most of the other top key-issues listed in Exhibit 5 relate to Healthcare, Taxes, and Budget.
This concludes our newsletter issue #4 for 2023/Q3.