The Best Investment in America Is Not Stocks. It Is Lobbying.
Lobbying in America hit $4.4 billion in federal spending in 2024, a new record. In 2025 it crossed $5
The S&P 500 returns around 10% a year on average. A study of 93 companies that lobbied on a 2004 tax provision found that for every dollar they spent lobbying, they received a return of $220. Another study examining corporate tax lobbying found returns ranging from 1,000% to over 22,000% when the legislation passed in the company’s favour.
No hedge fund, no private equity firm, no venture capital portfolio consistently produces numbers like that. The best investment available to a large American company is not listed on any exchange. It happens on K Street, three miles from the White House.
Jack Abramoff understood this better than anyone. He went to prison for it. When he came out, he said throwing him in jail had not cleaned up the system. He was right.
Abramoff was once the most powerful lobbyist in Washington, billing clients hundreds of thousands of dollars a month to make their problems disappear through connections he had spent years cultivating in Congress. He pleaded guilty in 2006 to fraud, tax evasion, and conspiracy to bribe public officials. His schemes resulted in convictions of 20 people. After serving three and a half years in federal prison, he went on a speaking tour and said something that got considerably less attention than his crimes: “Merits are interesting but they don’t necessarily win. What wins is money. Members of Congress won’t usually ask for it directly. They will often promise to support a bill and then mention a fundraiser they’re giving. They’re soliciting bribes, is what they’re doing.”
He said this in public. At Harvard Law School. Nobody was particularly surprised.
Lobbying in America hit $4.4 billion in federal spending in 2024, a new record. In 2025 it crossed $5 billion for the first time, with Bloomberg Government putting the figure at $5.3 billion and OpenSecrets at $5.08 billion. A total of 15,768 organisations reported lobbying activity in 2025, up from 14,061 the year before. The industry has more than doubled in inflation-adjusted terms since 2000.
The question is not why companies spend money on lobbying. The returns make that obvious. The question is how the system got built this way and why it stays that way.
A Citizen Writes a Letter. A Corporation Hires a Senator.
Lobbying in America is legal. It is protected by the First Amendment’s right to petition the government. A citizen writing to their congressman is technically lobbying. A trade association paying a former senator $500,000 a year to call his old colleagues on behalf of a pharmaceutical company is also technically lobbying.
The difference between the two is what the industry has spent decades exploiting.
Professional lobbying works through access. A senator’s former chief of staff, now working at a K Street firm, can get a meeting with that senator that a random constituent cannot. They share history. They speak the same language. They understand each other’s constraints. The lobbyist uses that relationship to present an argument, provide information, shape the framing of a policy question, and in many cases draft the actual legislative language that ends up in a bill.
Lobbyists are paid for who they know as much as what they know. This is not an assumption. It is quantified. Research published in the American Economic Review found that when a US senator leaves office, the revenue of lobbyists who previously worked for that senator drops by 24% immediately. The drop is proportional to the seniority of the departing senator and their committee assignment. The access, not the expertise, was the product being sold.
Which Industries Pay the Most and Why
The health sector spent $743.9 million on federal lobbying in 2024, making it the largest single sector for the 25th consecutive year since 1999. The pharmaceuticals and health products lobby has won, according to lobbying expert and author Brody Mullins, almost every major legislative fight it has engaged in over that period. Drug pricing reform has been discussed in Washington for decades. The pharmaceutical industry has blocked, delayed, or diluted every meaningful attempt to legislate it.
Oil and gas spent $153 million in 2024, its highest figure on record, driven by battles over EPA emissions rules and climate provisions in the Inflation Reduction Act. The National Association of Realtors spent $86 million, a two-thirds increase from the previous year, making it the single largest individual lobbying spender in 2024. Real estate industry lobbying overall rose 37% year on year to over $150 million.
Tech companies are a different kind of presence. Where the health sector’s spending is spread across hundreds of companies and trade associations, individual tech companies show up in the top 20 spenders as single entities. Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet each appeared in the top 20 lobbying spenders in 2024. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, went from spending $270,000 on federal lobbying in 2019 to $10.4 million in 2024, a 38-fold increase that tracked almost perfectly with the escalation of US government threats to ban the platform.
In 2025, lobbying related to domestic and foreign trade rose 42% year on year. Taxation lobbying rose 20%. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act was the most-lobbied piece of legislation of the year, with 2,354 organisations reporting activity on it.
The logic behind all of this spending is the same. The bigger the potential regulatory cost or legislative benefit, the higher the return on lobbying investment. A pharmaceutical company that spends $100 million lobbying against drug pricing reform and succeeds in blocking legislation worth billions in annual revenue has produced a return that no stock portfolio can touch.
The Revolving Door
The machinery that makes lobbying so effective is the movement of people between government and the industry.
A Congressional staffer spends years learning the legislative process, building relationships across committee staff, developing expertise in a specific policy area, and accumulating the contacts that make them valuable. Then they leave for a K Street firm at two to three times their government salary. A former senator or congressman commands considerably more.
Public Citizen found that in 2019 nearly two-thirds of former members of Congress who moved into the private sector took jobs with lobbying firms, consulting firms, or trade associations seeking to influence federal policy. A 2016 paper found that 50% of former House members and 60% of former Senators who left Congress in 2012 registered as lobbyists. In the 1970s, fewer than 10% of departing members made that move. The revolving door has been accelerating for fifty years.
The traffic moves in the other direction too. Former lobbyists take senior government roles, bringing with them knowledge of the industries they previously represented. Lloyd Austin, who became Secretary of Defense under Biden, had served on the boards of Raytheon, Nucor, and Booz Allen Hamilton before his appointment and had earned seven figures from defence companies. He stepped down from all three positions on nomination, as required. His knowledge of and connections to the defence industry went with him into the role.
Former Rep. Lynn Jenkins of Kansas launched her own lobbying firm before she had even left Congress. Former Rep. Joe Crowley, who lost his seat to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a 2018 primary, went to lobbying giant Squire Patton Boggs. As of 2024, 388 former members of Congress were active in the lobbying system tracked by OpenSecrets.
How Abramoff Actually Did It
The Abramoff case is worth understanding in detail because he has described, with unusual candour, exactly how the system works at its most transactional.
His method was to hire congressional staffers, not after they left government, but to promise them jobs while they were still working in congressional offices. The staffer, knowing their next employer was a lobbying firm Abramoff ran, would be helpful to his clients in ways that were technically legal and practically effective. He called them his people.
He also funded think tanks that produced research supporting his clients’ positions, providing intellectual legitimacy to arguments that were commercially motivated. He funded trips, golf outings to Scotland, tickets to sporting events, and restaurant meals. None of it was secret. All of it was legal. The bribery charges that eventually sent him to prison were not for the golf trips or the restaurant tabs. They were for wire fraud and conspiring to corrupt a public official in ways that crossed the specific legal line that most of his work was designed to approach without crossing.
“The key is to have your lobbyist be the most important source of information for the elected official,” Abramoff said. “We made sure our clients were part of every important conversation on the Hill.”
What Countries Without This Look Like
Lobbying in America sits at one end of a global spectrum. Canada occupies the other.
Canada has some of the strictest lobbying rules in the world. The Lobbying Act is overseen by a Commissioner of Lobbying who maintains a publicly searchable register. Lobbyists who violate the rules face bans, fines, or jail. Former senior officials face a five-year cooling-off period before they can lobby the government, more than double the two-year restriction in the United States.
France introduced mandatory registration under the Sapin II anti-corruption law in 2017. Germany introduced a lobbying register in 2021, though it has been criticised for not capturing all lobbying activity. Australia prohibits government representatives from meeting with a lobbyist who is not registered.
New Zealand has almost none of this. No register, no oversight body, no mandatory disclosure. A person can leave government on a Friday and lobby their former colleagues on Monday. Transparency International’s New Zealand chapter called the absence of oversight glaring in a 2022 report, despite New Zealand consistently ranking among the world’s least corrupt countries on other measures.
The OECD’s 2026 Anti-Corruption and Integrity Outlook found that only seven countries meet at least 80% of its criteria for quality lobbying regulation. Lobbying remains, as the OECD put it, among the least regulated public integrity areas across its membership.
The Bipartisan Problem Nobody Fixes
The political left and right in the United States disagree about almost everything. On lobbying in America they largely agree.
A consistent finding across polling is that Americans of both parties believe money has too much influence over Congress. The Tea Party that emerged after 2008 and Occupy Wall Street that followed it were ideologically opposed on almost every policy question and shared, almost word for word, the same critique of how Washington works.
This consensus has not produced reform. The reason is structural. The people with the most power to change the lobbying system are the people who benefit from it most directly, as current recipients of lobbying-funded campaign contributions, or as future entrants into the lobbying industry after they leave office. The incentive to fix the system is the inverse of the incentive to participate in it.
Abramoff’s prescription after prison: ban all lobbying by former members of Congress and their staff, for life. He acknowledged it will not happen.
“The political forces that would need to come together to change it,” he said, “are the same political forces that benefit from it. You can see the problem.”
The S&P 500 returned around 10% last year. The lobbying industry returned far more than that to its clients. In 2025, those clients spent over $5 billion on lobbying in America to keep it that way.
Sources
- OpenSecrets. Federal Lobbying Set New Record in 2024
- Bloomberg Government. DC Influence Industry Surpasses $4.5 Billion
- The Hilltop Online. 2025 Lobbying Spending Hit $5.3 Billion
- American Economic Review. Revolving Door Lobbyists by Blanes i Vidal, Draca, Fons-Rosen (2012)
- Public Citizen. Slowing the Federal Revolving Door
- Public Citizen. Nearly Two Thirds of Former Members of 115th Congress Now Working in Private Sector Have Jobs Influencing Federal Government
- Harvard Law School. Jack Abramoff Talks About Corruption in Washington
- NPR. Jack Abramoff: From Corrupt Lobbyist to Washington Reformer
- Transparency International New Zealand. New Zealand Lobbying Oversight Lacking
- OECD. Anti-Corruption and Integrity Outlook 2026: Lobbying
- Statista. Which Groups Have Too Much Influence on Congress
- Column Content. Lobbying Statistics and Trends in 2025
- Responsible Statecraft. These 100 Former US Lawmakers Have Become Foreign Lobbyists
