Washington’s Vanishing Lobbyists Hide Behind the Rules
When President Obama took office in 2008, he promised to curb the influence of special interests. Yet his new lobbying rules and a Bush-era law passed in the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal appear to have done little to curb lobbying—and may have created new loopholes for influence peddling. Even as the number of lobbyists has decreased, spending on lobbying has gone up, which experts attribute to a growing number of lobbyists operating under the radar.
A recent report by the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) found that there were close to 15,000 officially registered lobbyists in 2007; by last year that number had dropped to slightly more than 12,000. In 2007, total spending on lobbying approached $3 billion, and by 2012 it had jumped to around $3.3 billion. “An amazing amount of money continues to go up, even as the number of people [lobbying] goes down,” says James Thurber, a professor of government at American University who has served on the American Bar Association’s lobbying reform task force. (The report attributed a small decline in lobbying spending in the past two years to a number of factors, including the economy.)
What’s happening here? Monte Ward, the president of the American League of Lobbyists (ALA), estimates that lots of folks are still lobbying; they’re just not telling the government. “With all the restrictions the administration has placed on lobbyists, I think some have decided it’s not worth registering,” he says, adding that they’re doing the same job, but just “getting in under the radar.” Tim LaPira, a political science professor at James Madison University who focuses on lobbying law, says the well-intentioned Bush and Obama policies “actually created a gross disincentive to want to be open and public about what it is you’re doing.”
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