In January, US News and World Report released 2022’s Best Paying Cities, a list that ranks U.S. cities where workers employed in the country’s 100 highest-paying jobs make more than workers in other cities in the same occupation. In third place on that list is lawyers, who averaged $186,070.
That should come as no surprise, though, considering that lobbying firms employ a lot of lawyers, and they also consume a lot of Washington D.C. real estate. K Street used to be the lobbying hub of the U.S. Capitol, but now only one of the top 20 lobbying firms sits on K Street.
That does not mean however, they have gone away. Figures from opensecrets.org show Washington lobbyist totals in 2021 at 12,137, up from 11,533 in 2020. Lobbying money handed out in 2021 totaled $3.73 billion, up from $3.53 billion the prior year. The top lobbying firm for 2021 was Brownstein, Hyatt et al, with a total income of $55,640,000. In the last year of the Trump administration their income was $48,365,000.
Individual lobbyists have had an impact as well. In 2020, the top 25 spent over $8,600,000 lobbying in D.C.
In 2021 the top spender in Washington was the Chamber of Commerce, donating $66,390,000. Not surprisingly, Big Pharma came in third at $30,377,000 spent. No doubt, much of those two amounts went into congressional campaign coffers.
But it’s not just congress that gets the lobbyists attention each year. Many Executive Branch agencies, which are known to issue regulations, are visited by their local lobbyists as well. In 2021 the top agency getting lobbyist attention was the Department of health and Human Services, with 5,358 reports by 2797 lobbyists.
And as Foreign Lobby Watch tells us, “Many governments, companies and other entities pay foreign agents to influence U.S. policy and opinion in pursuit of their interests.” Since 2016, 878 foreign principals have spent $3,256,414,328 in lobbying money. And of the top 10 countries from 2016 to 2021, China came in second at $223,639,061. Only Japan spent more lobbying money to take first place at $236,002,053. Russia is also on that list, spending $162,718,491.
A poll at Statista.com shows congressional approval moving steadily downward from 36% in March 2021 to 18% in January 2022. Lobbyist spending in the same city that the congress occupies increased year over year from 2016 to 2021. Now, I realize that correlation is not causation, and you might say that’s an apples to oranges comparison but it is an interesting bit of data.
I’m so old I can remember sitting in social studies class and being taught that our system of government by the people meant that we elected representatives to go to Washington and vote with our interests in mind. My memory may be failing me, but I don’t remember the part about a lobbyist lawyer having more influence with my reps. But it has been apparent for some time that most of the 535 congresspersons, once in office, see their main objective as winning the next election. And in our current election process, that takes lots of money. Washington lobbyists fill that need.
How would congress function without lobbyists to help them out? They would have to study a bill and use their staff members to do some research in order to help them decide whether to vote for it or not. Granted, that might take more time, but maybe they could stop renaming post offices kill a few of those useless committees. And does anyone think fewer laws coming out of Washington each year would be a bad thing?
To steal and paraphrase a thought from Martin Luther King Jr., “I dream of a country where one day my children grow up to be represented by the people who vote them into office.” That dream scenario would require K Street and the other lobbyist addresses be vacated permanently. For the above mentioned 535, that would not be a dream, but a nightmare.
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