Billions of dollars are spent on lobbying that we have no idea about

Tim LaPira: I'm under contract writing a book on revolving door lobbyists. We're still working on that book, but what we did in that project is we took lobbying disclosure of LDA [Lobbying Disclosure Act] registered lobbyists as our sampling frame. And I pulled a random sample out of that and gave the name to student assistants who sat here in my office, and essentially Google-stalked them to try to reconstruct their resumes as best they could.

But in the process of doing that project, we were noticing that when we would search for, say, Lobbyist X that was on our sampling frame, they would be employed in an office right next to another person that was doing similar work, and we'd realize, well, that person is not registered. So then it raised the question of, how common is that? Because most of the media reporting on this — I'm assuming you're familiar with the Tom Daschle loophole. Tom Daschle comes off the Hill  — he didn't want to, but he did — gets a job at this law and lobbying firm, brings in all these clients, brings in millions of dollars — never registers to lobby — and he can do that perfectly legally because he was reading the statutory definition of what a lobbyist is in the LDA very closely.

So the kicker there is you gotta spend 20 percent of your time on behalf of a client in the quarter in which you're reporting. That is — so think about that, that is one day a week, one entire day in a week, for one particular client. How often do you spend an entire day working on a single project every week - for an entire quarter? That's just not the modern professional world. So Daschle starts doing that. Then Gingrich gets called out in the Republican nomination race a few years back, he called himself a policy historian for Fannie Mae, right, and earned 10 million dollars.

But my question was, how common actually is it? So I went back to the drawing board, and drew a new sample. So I went to Washington Representatives, Lobbyists.info is their website, and I bought the whole thing to use as my sampling frame. Every single name in that directory as of 2012. And I pulled out a random sample of them and basically had students do the same thing — go Google-stalk them, figure out where they worked.

The question was, is the job that we can determine from their biography or from their job title or from the firm they're working for, are they engaged in federal public policy? If so we call them a policy advocate. There's a number of people in that directory that didn't exactly fit the bill, but most of them did. And of the people that were involved in any way in public policy, about half of them were registered to lobby and half of them weren't.

Based on that we extrapolated out and tried to — based on the assumptions of this population, the actual size of the influence political economy — it's at least twice as much, right? So we're talking probably 7 billion dollars, and less than half of that is really accounted for under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. And the truth is I'm probably undercounting a lot of that.

Tim LaPira: I would have to look a little bit more closely because I think he's being really careful about what his job is. But, probably, right? Being involved in the public policy process involves not just pushing policy recommendations and providing policy information — to me, it also includes monitoring political activities and policy developments that the general public does not have access to. This also describes the so-called political intelligence industry. Even a registered lobbyist, 90 percent of her job is monitoring policy developments, right? Her job is not just to push her clients' issues towards the government, it's also to pay attention to what the government's doing and report back to the clients. And they get paid a lot of money to do that because they have contacts on the Hill, they know what sources of information to check as opposed to just waiting for a story to break in the media. So associations and corporations pay a lot of money for this, because if they have a five-year budget cycle, they know — gee, down the road, is there going to be a big push to regulate our industry or is there going to be some change that's going to affect our customers, or whatever it might be — there are a lot of good, perfectly legitimate reasons to monitor public policy. And if that's what lobbyists are doing — and political intelligence agents or whatever they call themselves are doing the same damn thing — it's a distinction without a difference, basically.

Tim LaPira: I have a journal article on that that compares the clienteles of revolving door lobbyists to regular lobbyists. Essentially what we find is that the revolving door lobbyist has a much greater variety of their clienteles. So for instance, if you had worked in say like three offices on Capitol Hill, chances are you're going to be representing clients from the ag industry, the health care industry, and the energy industry, that aren't related to each other whatsoever as far as politics and policy expertise. But if you're a conventional lobbyist, you most likely have come up through your industry and established yourself as an expert. So you're only going to represent either health care or agribusiness or energy. So we interpret that to say — what the revolving door lobbyist is doing is trading on her process knowledge and connections and access. Relative to your typical or conventional lobbyist, that is much more a policy expert, their job is to provide information subsidies to government, so that they can make good policy decisions. So that's what that project was. In the book we're going to look at how much money they make, the types of issues that they lobby on, and all that stuff.

Tim LaPira: The number one thing is, the public and much of the media and even some of the good government groups out there, conflate campaign finance with public policy influence. The assumption is that every dollar spent putting an ad up on a campaign, turns into something — as if it's an investment vehicle to get out of the public policy process what they want. It sounds so simple.

But we know that the public policy process and the way our government works is so much more complicated, that it doesn't always mean that a dollar on the campaign finance side is going to influence any kind of public policy outcomes. In fact, the best-known project, the Baumgartner et al Lobbying and Policy Change book, I was a researcher on that in grad school. And they show this — the side that spends more on campaign finance does not necessarily win.

We know that inside the government, politicians have their own motivations. They have their own public policy goals, and chiefly, they have reelection in mind, right? So they’re not just sort of standing back and waiting for an interest group to come up and ask them to dole something out to them. So if we think about it like that it’s really hard to get out of the government what you want, especially when you multiply it by the tens of thousands of other interests out there that are all trying to do the same thing.

Baumgartner’s argument is basically that interest groups respond to the government agenda. The most successful interest groups are going to be the ones that have the credibility and the resources to best respond when issues that matter to them become a top priority. So outside interests don’t push the agenda as much as they respond to it.