Posted by Keturah Hetrick on July 27, 2020
The pandemic may have brought much of the U.S. economy to a standstill, but one particular business is booming - lobbying.
Last quarter saw the most lobbying activity of any second quarter in nine years, according to LegiStorm data. Lobbyists disclosed a total of 20,963 federal contracts from April through June. That's a three percent increase over the 20,328 filings from last year's second quarter.
The number of Q2 contracts shrank annually from 22,299 in 2011 to 18,074 in 2016 and has grown each year since. Of course, many hundreds of contracts this year have explicitly listed COVID-19 among their lobbying issues. But trade and tariff lobbying also represented a sizable proportion of filings, with 2,034 mentions versus 2,029 in 2019 Q2.
Some people and organizations who "caught our eye" last week:
