The Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act database is public. It covers every registered lobbyist, lobbying firm, and client in the US federal system, along with semi-annual spending reports and the specific issues and agencies each engagement covers. The data goes back to 1999 and is updated regularly. It is one of the cleaner public government datasets -- but the web interface was not designed for bulk export or programmatic access.
Why automate this?
Lobbying disclosure data is used across several professional contexts:
- Competitive intelligence -- tracking which companies are lobbying on issues relevant to your industry, and how much they are spending
- Policy research -- identifying which organizations are active on a specific bill, agency, or issue area
- Journalist and advocacy work -- mapping client-lobbyist relationships for investigative reporting
- KYC and due diligence -- checking whether a counterparty has active federal lobbying registrations
- Government relations benchmarking -- understanding how peer organizations staff and fund their DC presence
Manual lookups work for a single organization. Anything involving multiple companies, recurring monitoring, or bulk data export requires automation.
How the lobbying disclosure system works
The LDA system has two main record types: registrations (who has filed as a lobbyist or firm for which client) and filings (periodic activity reports with spending amounts and issue codes). Registrations identify the relationship; filings show what was actually done and how much was spent.
The Senate LDA API supports search by registrant name, client name, lobbyist name, issue code, filing type, and date range.
What data you get
Each record in the output includes:
-
filing_uuid-- unique filing identifier -
filing_type-- registration, amendment, termination, activity report -
filing_yearandfiling_period-- report period -
registrant_name-- lobbying firm or in-house government relations team -
client_name-- organization paying for the lobbying -
lobbyists-- array of individual lobbyist names -
lobbying_activities-- array with issue codes (e.g., TAX, HCR, DEF) and description of work -
incomeorexpenses-- reported spending for the period -
government_entities-- agencies and congressional bodies contacted
Running a search
The Lobbying Disclosure Search actor on Apify accepts a client name, registrant name, issue code, or date range. It queries the Senate LDA API and returns normalized records.
Example input:
{
"clientName": "Google",
"filingYear": 2023,
"maxResults": 100
}
Output is available as JSON or CSV.
Practical workflow
For competitive intelligence: run the actor with a competitor's legal name as the client. Pull filings from the past 2 years. The lobbying activities field shows which issues they are working and which agencies they are targeting -- useful context for understanding their regulatory strategy.
For policy monitoring: run with a specific issue code (e.g., HCR for health care, FIN for financial services) and a quarterly date window. The output shows which organizations filed activity reports on that issue, which agencies they contacted, and reported spending.
Next steps
Federal lobbying disclosure is a high-signal public dataset that is underutilized because bulk access is awkward. The actor handles the API layer so you can focus on the analysis.
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