In the three months before congressional leaders announced that they are once again opening the process to suspend tariffs, at least 71 private companies have already lobbied to get their own exemption and nine more have registered. Each one has a product they’d like to import a little more cheaply. So far this year, the companies report lobbying expenditures of $14 million on issues including this one – but if history is any guide, it may be well worth the expense.

The last time Congress passed a miscellaneous tariff bill (MTB), in 2010, it cost taxpayers $298 million in lost revenue over three years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Members have until tonight to send in provisions they want included in this year’s legislation, according to House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, D-Mont.

In short, the MTB is legislation written for corporations, by corporations to save them money on products they import and use in manufacturing. The companies solicit members of Congress to introduce bills reducing their tariffs and those bills eventually get rolled into the MTB, a long green eyeshade document that few members of Congress likely will take the time to read. Call it “nearmarking.” With earmarks now banned, critics say the tariff bill offers members of Congress an alternate route to get special favors for pet concerns at taxpayer expenses. Republican Sens. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., have introduced legislation would send all tariff requests directly to the International Trade Commission (ITC), cutting Congress out of the process.

“There is no good reason why businesses go to members of Congress and not directly to the International Trade Commission with their petitions,” said DeMint spokesman Wesley Denton.

But guess who’s pushing the tariff bill? Sixty freshman Republican lawmakers –who generally have been among the loudest voices against special dealing and for deficit reduction -- recently wrote to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., urging favorable treatment of the MTB. They argued that it’s a bill that will spur American jobs.

Lobbying

Congress considers tariff legislation almost every two years. And while heavy corporate lobbying on it is typical, it's hard to compare historic spending trends because lobbying records weren't digitized until 2008 and congressional lobbying records didn't begin tracking lobbying specifically on the miscellaneous tariff bill until the last few years.

But the number of tariff suspensions enacted by Congress appears to be on the upswing. In 2004, Congress passed an MTB with 433 tariff suspensions. Two years later, the MTB that passed two years later suspended duties on 280 products and generated a tariff savings of about $660 million for corporations according to a study conducted by Capital Trade, Incorporated, an economic consulting firm that focuses on international trade. But later that year, Congress approved a second bill suspending duties on another 580 products. During the 111th Congress, which ran from 2009 through 2010, lobbying records on file with the Senate show 192 companies with $385 million in lobbying expenses on tariff issues. Of that amount, $205 million was spent in the final six months before passage of H.R. 4380, the United States Manufacturing Enhancement Act of 2010. The bill included duty suspensions on 665 products, benefiting 113 corporations, according to data provided by the House Ways and Means committee.

An examination of the 2010 bill and lobbying records related to the MTB provides vivid examples of how members of Congress use the tariff legislation to do favors for home-state businesses.

Bayer

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., submitted 28 requests to suspend duties on products for Bayer. All but three made it into law. Overall, Bayer got a remarkable 62 duty suspensions from 15 members of Congress, making the German drug manufacturer the top beneficiary of the bill. Mary Petrovic, Rep. Cleaver's press secretary, defended the support, noting that Bayer employs a number of people in his home district in Missouri.

Bayer and its subsidiaries spent $8.3 million lobbying the bill and other issues in 2009 and 2010 according to records disclosed with the Senate. The corporation has reported spending $7.2 lobbying the issue and others this session so far.

Cleaver also received $5,500 in campaign contributions from employees of Bayer and their family members during the 2007-2008 and the 2009-2010 election cycles. So far this cycle he’s received $2,000 from people associated with Bayer, according to InfluenceExplorer.com.

Michelin

An examination of lobbying records disclosed in 2010 showed that the tire manufacturer Michelin lobbied on 21 bills introduced by Senator Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., to reimburse duties they paid on tire products. Michelin, which operates a number of plants in Graham’s state, reported spending at least $1.1 million on issues including tariffs and was the only company that reported lobbying on the 21 original bills dealing with tariff reimbursements that Graham introduced. The provisions Michelin wanted made it into the final bill.

Tracking which corporations benefit from provisions that originated on the Senate side is harder than the House side, because the Senate traditionally has not revealed which members requested each provision. It’s not clear whether the Senate will adopt the House transparency process this time around. That potentially could shed more light on relationships between senators and the corporations they help through this bill.

Dan Ikenson, an expert in trade issues at the Cato Institute, favors of reducing all tariffs unilaterally. But he called, the MTB is a good thing even though it only temporarily suspends duties on a limited number of products. He described the measure as “gradual progress” towards creating more competition in the markets.

Ikenson, however, doesn’t agree with all of the rules that go into writing the MTB. Only allowing import products to be considered if they are not produced in the United States is bad for competition., he said. Magnesium, for instance, is only produced by one company in the United States and therefore has little incentive to make prices competitive, Ikenson said. He argued that lifting duties on imported magnesium would allow U.S. manufacturers to get better prices.

“We’re picking winners and losers in our markets by placing duties on certain items,” Ikenson said.

If you think you wound up paying too much in taxes this year, maybe you ought to hire a lobbyist. Or two. Or 20. After all, it’s a strategy that seems to be working well for some of the nation’s biggest corporations.

As Americans prepare for tax day 2012, a new Sunlight analysis of lobbying and corporate tax rates finds that among 200 of the largest U.S. companies, the companies that spent the most on lobbying most effectively reduced their reported tax rates between 2007 and 2010.

On average, companies we examined reported paying a slightly lower overall tax rate in 2010 than in 2007 (average tax rate of 29.3 percent in 2010 as compared to 29.9 percent in 2007), with a decline in the median reported tax rate from 31.8 percent to 31.6 percent. Fifty-five percent of the companies paid a lower rate in 2010 than in 2007.

But of the eight companies that spent the most on federal lobbying between 2007 and 2009, seven decreased their overall tax rate between 2007 and 2010. And six of the Big Eight enjoyed a decrease of at least seven percentage points.

Table 1. Changes in reported tax rates

Combined, the Big Eight spent $540 million on lobbying between 2007 and 2009. In total, they filed 332 lobbying reports that mentioned taxes, naming 491 different tax bills over the three-year period we investigated (see table 2).

Table 2. Lobbying on tax bills

Compared to what their taxes would have been if their 2007 tax rates were applied to their 2010 income, we estimate that the seven companies that lowered their taxes saved a combined $11 billion on $120 billion in reported 2010 profits. If we assume that the entire reduction was due to their lobbying, the return on investment would be 2,069%.  Of course, this is probably not the case. Without a detailed analysis of these companies’ taxes, it would be impossible to tell why their rates fell. But we can observe that it is very unlikely that the eight companies that lobbied the most between 2007 and 2009 all would have seen such significant drops in their tax rates by random chance alone.

Statistically, the likelihood of that seven of eight firms that ran up the biggest lobbying tabs all lowering their reported tax rates by chance alone is about seven percent, which makes it highly unlikely but within the real of random possibility (assuming we take the overall probability of an individual company lowering its taxes at 55 percent). Moreover, only 19 of the nation’s 200 highest earning companies reduced their tax rate by more than seven percentage points. Within this universe of companies, the likelihood of six of the Big Eight lowering their rates by at least seven percentage points purely by random chance is less than 1 in 100,000.

Of course, the Big Eight were not unique in lobbying on taxes. More than two-thirds of the nation’s 200 largest companies lobbied on at least one tax bill in the last three years. Of the 182 large companies that reported at least some lobbying during the period, 73 percent lobbied on taxes. Combined, the 182 companies filed 2,405 unique reports mentioning tax lobbying, with a total of 3,600 unique tax bill mentions.

Companies lobby so much because Congress is constantly making changes to the tax code. Between 1987 and 2011, the number of pages in the CCH Standard Federal Tax Reporter (one measure of the growing complexity of the federal tax code) more than doubled, growing from 33,030 pages to 72,574 pages. More than half of those pages have been added since 2001.  In 2005, the President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform counted approximately 15,000 separate changes to the tax code since 1986 (more than two a day). “Each one of these changes had a sponsor,” wrote the panel in its report, “and each had a rationale to defend it. Each one was passed by Congress and signed into law.”

It’s not surprising then, that we recently found that a committee seat on the House Ways and Means Committee (which has jurisdiction over tax rates) is worth an estimated $258,000 in extra fundraising. After all, a substantial number of companies appear to be after highly-prized tax benefits. And PAC and employee contributions to committee members are generally an effective way of gaining access. 

Regression analysis

Taking the 200 companies as a whole, we estimate that for each additional $1 million that companies spent lobbying between 2007 and 2009, their 2010 tax rate fell by 7/100ths of a percent. While that might not sound like much, for a $2.5 billion company at the median in our sample of large companies, each $1 million spent on lobbying translates into an estimated annual tax savings of $1.8 million – almost double the original investment, with benefits likely to continue in the future. Table 3 reports the results of a OLS regression estimating companies’ 2010 tax rate as a function of their lobbying totals between 2007 and 2009, controlling for size, industry, and 2007 tax rate. The estimate of a decrease of 7/100ths of a percent is statistically significant, though just slightly.

Table 3. OLS regression results of effect of lobbying on tax rate

However, the result appears to be largely driven by the eight companies that lobby the most. If we remove those companies from the sample, the estimated effect of lobbying on tax reduction drops to 5/1000ths of a percent per $1 million spent on lobbying, with a 35.5% chance of being zero (the absolute minimum for statistical significance is a 10% chance of being zero).

Conclusion

When it comes to paying less in taxes, having an army of lobbyists appears to be helpful. Many companies lobby on taxes, but those who spend the most report the largest and most consistent declines in tax rates. Of the eight companies who spent the most money lobbying between 2007 and 2009 seven saw their 2010 tax rates decline from what they paid in 2007. While it is difficult to show causality, the likelihood of this happening by random chance is less than 1 in 100. And of those eight companies, six reduced their tax rates by at least seven percentage points. Given the larger patterns we’ve observed, the likelihood of this happening by random chance is less than 1 in 100,000. At the very least, we know that the companies that lobby the most are also the  companies who have figured out some way to pay millions less in taxes than they did just a few years ago.

Methodology and sample

Our set of 200 companies includes the largest 200 U.S. companies (ranked by 2010 pre-tax income) that met the following criteria: in both 2007 and 2010 they reported tax rates that ranged between -50% and 50% both years, and their income in 2007 was positive. We did this because we wanted to eliminate cases in which tax rates were likely to be driven by one-time events. This is admittedly not a perfect approach, but we wanted tax rates to be appropriately comparable between the two years and to eliminate outliers.

We calculated the base tax rate using Compustat data, and thus we rely on what companies reported in their financial statements as their pre-tax income and their income tax paid (in this, we follow the approach of Richter et al. 2009, who also find that companies that lobby more pay less in taxes). Our decision to look at the cumulative lobbying over three years is based on the assumption that tax lobbying takes place over multiple years and tax benefits do not always kick in immediately.

The list of companies and their tax and lobbying data can be found here.

Special thanks to Alison Rowland for her help in preparing this analysis.

Correction: Altria's tax rates were originally reported incorrectly. The post has been updated to reflect Altria's correct tax rates.

If you haven’t already listened to This American Life’s episode, “Take the Money and Run for Office,” I encourage you to set aside 45 minutes in your busy life so you can listen to it uninterrupted. It’s a brilliant piece of storytelling that goes far and beyond my most optimistic dreams for how long-form journalism can illuminate how money affects politics (and governance) in our nation. (Plus, this Brooklyn-born Woody Allen fan was especially delighted with the clever headline This American Life used, a play on one of Allen’s earliest feature films, “Take the Money and Run.”)

As Communications Director at Sunlight, I work nearly every day with reporters to better understand our work, how government works and how to follow the money in our elections to know who and what influences our elected officials. I can’t express to you how proud I was to hear how Sunlight’s Party Time site and on-going work helped inform the narrative expertly created by This American Life, Planet Money and NPR’s congressional team.

From the episode’s gripping intro of my own representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, pleading for donations to the deft editing of appropriate music clips to keep the story moving, they did a superb job in translating the wonky details to something any listener could understand. They went above and beyond to show how we can use data to create transparency around how members of Congress raise money and the impact their fundraising has on their policy work and relationships with lobbyists. We worked with NPR's teams in their reporting, and are thrilled their work is already elevating public dialogue about an issue Sunlight (and you, dear reader), has cared about for years. It is definitely worth listening to, reading and sharing with your friends.

This episode has also taught me patience - as a PR professional, that’s not something that comes to me naturally. Nearly four years ago, Sunlight launched Party Time, the first centralized, free site where anyone could monitor the fundraising circuit that keeps members of Congress flush with cash for their re-elections--a persistent activity that keeps lawmakers busy hobnobbing with lobbyists and donors morning, noon and night. While reporters instantly began citing Party Time’s data to provide context on their reporting on political fundraising, I longed for a feature-length news piece that would create the ‘a-ha’ moment needed to really bring home why understanding the site’s data matters.

The Federal Election Commission releases campaign finance disclosures months after the money is raised and cashed; Party Time collects information on fundraisers that are happening today—and next week, and in some cases months ahead. When we created it, we thought that even though it could never be as comprehensive as we’d want since we rely upon the kindness of political insiders to leak the invitations they receive [hint, anyone can upload an invite]. But we always hoped Party Time would prove to be a useful early warning system for tracking influence in Congress, especially since it is the only data source that provides real-time and prospective insight into the fundraising activities of federal candidates. It may not be a site that attracts a lot of online visitors, but it does document daily how members of Congress chase donors, proving to be a powerful, unique resource for disclosure where no disclosure is required by law.

And, with news accounts like This American Life’s episode, I hope more people become interested in tuning into how Washington truly operates and joining Sunlight in our work to continue to shine a light on it all.

This is our democracy, after all, not one just for the one percent.

**Graphic of Party Time data by Lam Thuy Vo, NPR | Planet Money

by Cassandra LaRussa

Only 63% of information disclosed on lobbying reports were "properly reported and supported," according to a new Government Accountability Office audit. The March 2012 report surveyed lobbyist compliance with federal reporting requirements during 2011. According to the report, the major reasons for inaccurate disclosure reports included confusion regarding the definition of “lobbying activities” and the definitions of “covered positions.”

Although the majority of lobbyists surveyed indicated that lobbying reporting (LD-2) disclosure requirements were overall “easy” or “somewhat easy” to meet, some lobbyists interviewed indicated that they “were not sure when research and support activities become lobbying activities and therefore needed to be disclosed.” Others described confusion “as to whether congressional interns were considered covered positions and therefore need to be disclosed.” At least 11% of lobbyists in the study did not disclose previously held covered positions.

After the audit, 17 lobbying firms planned to amend and resubmit their LD-2 forms.

GAO reviewed a random sample of 100 LD-2 Forms, which lobbyists must file according to the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. After examining the LD-2 forms, GAO asked lobbyists to verify the reported information by providing supporting documents.

Although lobbyists are not required to keep this documentation on file, all lobbyists complied with the request and provided documents to support 93% of the disclosure reports. Last year, lobbyists selected for review were able to support 97% of their reports. Reasons for not providing supporting documentation included a lack of recordkeeping and situations in which lobbyists over-reported, and did not actually lobby during the time period in question.

The GAO study also looked at LD-203 forms, in which lobbyists disclose their federal campaign contributions. Only 86% of lobbyists in the study who were required to file an LD-203 actually did so. At least 4% omitted one or more political contributions that should have been reported.

There has only been one enforcement case brought by the Department of Justice since the enactment of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. The GAO indicated that the US Attorney’s Office hired a new staff member in September 2010 specifically to handle lobbying compliance matters and developed a “top-ten list of noncompliant lobbyists” for closer investigation.

Photo credit [F]oxymoron

Written by Policy Fellow Matt Rumsey

The House of Representatives'  internal operations budget was the subject of a Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee hearing this morning. In the last two years, the House's budget was decreased by 10% from its FY2010 level, and it may be set for a further reduction.

Ander Crenshaw (R-FL), chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch, made clear in his opening statement that he expected the eventual budget allocation to be lower for FY 2013 than in previous years. Mike Honda (D-CA), the subcommittee's ranking member, called cuts to the House budget "misguided" and questioned the effect they would have on staff compensation, office operations, and the legislative process. The effect of budget cuts on Congress's ability to do its job was the subject of a 2010 Sunlight Foundation report.

A number of department heads submitted testimony for the hearing. Of particular interest were statements by the Clerk of the House and the Office of Law Revision Counsel that discussed ongoing transparency measures, many of which are crucial for how the public learns about the House's operations.

Karen Haas, Clerk of the House of Representatives, highlighted the Clerk's transparency efforts in her opening statement and written testimony. The Clerk's proposed budget, a 14% decrease from FY 2012, includes funding to continue "deploying new technology as part of a continuing effort to improve the efficiency and transparency of House floor proceedings." Haas touted the launch of docs.house.gov, improvements to HouseLive.gov, and an upgraded interface to track House floor activities on the Clerk's website as successful initiatives. We agree.

The Clerk's transparency plans for FY 2013 include the addition of committee documents to docs.house.gov, improved video streaming services, and an update to the Legislative Information Management System that will complete its modernization. We welcome the further improvements to docs.house.gov, and hope that along with an improved LIS will be better access to legislative information. The Clerk's office is also working with the Senate to develop a web-based filing system for lobbying disclosure information, an improvement which is long overdue.

Haas also cited CBO estimates that the electronic filing and disclosure system mandated by the recently passed STOCK Act would cost $4 million to implement and $1 million every year to manage. This cost was not factored in to the Clerk's budget request. Rep. Steven LaTourette (R-OH) expressed disdain for the legislation and concern over the cost. To be effective, the STOCK Act must be fully funded and enforced.

Ralph Seep, the Law Revision Counsel of the House of Representatives, submitted a budget request equal to his offices' FY2012 appropriation. His statement highlighted recent upgrades to the US Code's online presence and stressed efforts to update the code in a more efficient manner. The FY 2013 request would make it possible for LRC to continue converting to an XML based production system and maintain and make further upgrades to their website. We agree that these improvements are important, as the public deserves timely access to laws as they are codified. More on LRC here.

It is also worth noting that this hearing was not webcast.

Additional Resources:

• Statement of the House Sergeant-At-Arms Paul Irving
• Statement of Chief Administrator Officer Daniel Strodel
• Statement of Kerry Kircher, General Counsel
• Statement of Inspector General Theresa Grafenstine

For the latest proof of the importance of money in politics, look no further than the Wednesday decision by Bob Kerrey to make a comeback bid for his old Senate seat and the excitement it is generating.

Never mind that Nebraska's one-time Democratic governor and senator has spent the last decade living in New York City's legendarily hip Greenwich Village. Never mind that he had to use his sister's address to register to vote in the state where he was born. Never mind that he hasn't been on a ballot since 1994 and will have to reintroduce himself to a new generation of Nebraskans.

He should have plenty of dough to help him do so. The one constant throughout the brainy, mercurial Kerrey's career has been his track record as a money magnet.

Sunlight's Influence Explorer shows that Kerrey raised nearly $10 million during the 12 years he was in the Senate. That's on top of the $681,000 that records on file with Nebraska's Accountability and Disclosure office show he raised for his first race, a successful 1982 campaign for governor. As chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from 1995-96, Kerrey helped rake in another $33 million for his party.

Nor did his fundraising prowess end with his political career: The New School of Social Research, which Kerrey headed from 2001 until last year, credits him with raising more than $110 million to spark a major expansion of the Manhattan-based university. Benefactors included such bold-faced names as fashion designers Donna Karan and Diane von Furstenburg and media mogul Barry Diller. Influence Explorer also shows the New School's sophistication in the ways of Washington: The university has spent nearly $4 million lobbying, and has been rewarded with some $22 million in federal grants and contracts.

Like former Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and current Sen. Dan Coats, R-Ind., before him, Kerrey is demonstrating the power of a proven fundraiser to displace the ambitions of lesser-known locals.

"I gave up my seat on the University of Nebraska Board of Regents based on his word," Chuck Hasselbrook, a Democrat who says he entered the Senate race only after Kerrey assured him he wouldn't, told the Christian Science Monitor.

The Nebraska race is likely to be hard-fought and expensive, and it could be key to determining whether Democrats manage to maintain control of the Senate, where they now hold a 53-47 vote edge (a margin that includes two independents, Connecticut's Joe Lieberman, and Vermont's Bernie Sanders, who caucus with the Democrats). It's not unheard-of in such circumstances for parties to turn to a familiar face with a proven track record of bringing in the bucks. In 2000, when Democratic leaders worried that then-New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani would enter the race for the seat of retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N,Y., Rep. Nita Lowey, a veteran Democrat from the New York City suburbs, had to give up her hopes of moving to the other side of the Capitol in favor of Clinton. The then-first lady ran her campaign for New York's Senate seat from the White House. And in 2010, when the retirement of Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., opened up an opportunity for Republicans, party leaders recruited Coats, who served in the Senate during the 1990s, over a former GOP congressman and state senator who also wanted the nomination.

Kerrey, 68, is a former Navy Seal who walks -- and sometimes jogs -- on a prosthesis, the result of losing part of his right leg to a grenade attack in Vietnam. His his war record came under a cloud, however, in 2001 when he acknowledged participating in an attack where Vietnamese civilians, many of them women and children, were killed. First elected to the Senate in 1988, Kerrey four years later launched a campaign for president. He lost the Democratic nomination to Bill Clinton in a campaign not marked by good feelings. Kerrey famously called the future president "an unusually good liar." Back in the Senate, where he won a second term in 1994, he was an early advocate for health care reform and Social Security reform. In 2000, he abruptly announced that he would not seek a third term and moved to New York to head the New School. In 2005, he briefly considered challenging Michael Bloomberg for New York City mayor.

The 2006 race for the seat that Kerrey is now seeking cost $20 million -- a figure driven up by the personal funds poured into the race by millionaire Republican candidate Pete Ricketts. Democratic incumbent Ben Nelson won, despite being outspent nearly two-to-one -- a sign that while money talks, it can only walk you so far.

(Keenan Steiner contributed reporting for this post)

NOTE: It has been brought to our attention by LegisStorm that our list of staffers who became a lobbyist has a number of errors caused by false positives resulting from our process of matching staffer names with lobbyist names. We are investigating. Any reporting based on this post should be double-checked by contacting the offices involved.

The revolving door is alive and well in Washington. In less than three years, at least 377 House staffers employed in personal and committee offices have left Capitol Hill to become registered lobbyists, a Sunlight Foundation analysis of U.S. House disbursement data and federal lobbying records finds.

More than two in five former House staffers who registered as lobbyists went to one of Washington’s many lobbying firms. One in five went to lobby for a for-profit corporation, and another one in five went to lobby for a business or trade association. In other words, corporate America is capturing the lion’s share of former Hill staffers’ expertise. A large number also represent state and local governments and universities in their work for lobbying firms.

These lobbyists come from all rungs of the House hierarchy. The 377 staffers who left to lobby included 50 legislative assistants, 32 chiefs of staff, 26 legislative directors, and 22 staff assistants.

Many lobbyists came from committees as well. The Committee with the clearest path to K Street was the Financial Services Committee, where nine of 71 staffers (12.7%) went off to lobby within two years, followed closely by Judiciary (9.0%) and Oversight and Government Reform (8.7%).

Congress’s loss is the private sector’s gain. When House offices lose staffers who have built up experience and relationships in Congress, private interests gain both their policy knowhow and their political networks. Meanwhile, the House offices often find themselves relying on the expertise of their former staffers who are now in the employ of private interests.

Recently, we noted that the average House office had a retention rate of 64.2% over a two-year period. Although the majority of departing staff do not move to K Street, 377 staffers is still a significant number.

For a complete list of all the staffers who registered to lobby, what office they worked in, and where they went to lobby, click here.

WHERE STAFFERS GO ON K STREET

More than 80% of former Hill staffers who leave to lobby take jobs at Washington lobbying firms (41.5%), individual corporations (21.3%) and business and trade associations (19.1%).

By comparison, fewer than one in ten go to work for a non-profit advocacy group. Only a single former House staffer went to work for a labor union, though a few do represent unions as part of their work with Washington lobbying firms. Some (5.1%) went to work for occupational associations, such as the American Dental Association or the International Association of Fire Chiefs; another nine went to work for institutions, mostly universities.

It's important to emphasize that this analysis is limited to registered lobbying. If former House staffers joined advocacy organizations but did not register as lobbyists, they will not show up in these tabulations.

Figure 1. Where staffers who become lobbyists go to lobby

graphic by Ali Felski

If we look at the employment destinations by position in the House, we can see some different career paths. While 56.2% of chiefs of staff who became lobbyists joined Washington lobbying firms, only 30.8% of legislative directors and 23.1% of legislative assistants who registered as lobbyists did so for a lobbying firms

Legislative directors who go downtown are about equally likely to wind up in a lobbying firm, a corporation, or a business or trade association. Legislative assistants are most likely to wind up in a business or trade association.

Non-profit advocacy, meanwhile, did not attract a single chief of staff, but it did attract two of the 26 legislative directors going to lobby and five of the 52 legislative assistants.

Generally, work in a lobbying firm offers individuals the opportunity to make the most money, though it also generally requires the most work. Some individuals prefer the stability or predictability of a corporation or a trade association, where one does not have to shift between multiple clients and does not have to hustle for new business.

Figure 2. Where staffers who become lobbyists go to lobby, by position

graphic by Ali Felski

REPRESENTATION BY SECTOR

What types of interests do these former staffers represent? In order to answer this question, we added up the number of lobbying contracts that mentioned these staffers.  State and local governments top the list, with 295 contracts, followed closely by pharmaceutical companies at 263, education (mostly universities) at 261, computers/internet at 226, and electric utilities at 192.

Table 1. Sectors former House staffers represent

Certainly, there are different ways to cut these numbers. Telephone utilities, for example spent $253 million on contracts that included these lobbyists, as compared to state and local governments, which spent $38 million, although there were many more contracts involving state and local governments.

A LOOK AT WHO GOES TO BECOME A LOBBYIST

Among the staffers who left, about two-thirds (243) previously worked in member personal offices. Of these individuals, 60.5% (147) came from Democratic offices, as compared to 39.5% (96) from Republicans. Much of this disparity, however, has to do with the fact that the Democrats lost 63 seats in the 2010 mid-term elections, putting hundreds of Democratic staffers out of work.

Among the 147 Democratic staffers who left to become lobbyists, 63 (43%) worked for members who were defeated or retired in 2010.Of member staffers-turned-lobbyists, 32% (77) came from offices where members were defeated or retired; the remaining 68% (166) worked for members who are still in office.

Table 2. Partisanship and member status of staffers turned lobbyists

three members of Congress sent at least four staffer to the ranks of registered lobbyists since 2009: Michael A. Arcuri (D-NY, 5), Adam Putnam (R-FL, 4), and Laura Richardson (D-CA, 4). Arcuri and Putnam are no longer in Congress. Both Arcuri and Richardson were on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Putnam was on the Financial Services Committee.  Table 3 shows the members at least three staff  who became lobbyists.Almost 40% (177) of the House offices in 2009 had at least one staffer become a lobbyist by 2011, and 11% (49) sent at least two individuals to become lobbyists. 

Table 3. Members with highest rates of staff going to lobby

COMMITTEES

Some committees are more likely to generate future lobbyists than others. Perhaps not surprisingly, the House committee with the highest percentage of former staffers going to lobby was the Financial Services Committee, where nine of 71 staffers (12.7%) went off to lobby. The Financial Services Committee handled the Dodd-Frank bill, which will continue to generate major lobbying activity for years as financial regulatory agencies work their way through the approximately 400 rulemaking the bill calls for. The Judiciary (9.0%) and Oversight and Government Reform (8.7%) had the next highest rates. Appropriations sent the most individuals to lobby (11, out of 145 staffers)

Table 4. Rate of staffers becoming lobbyists, by committee/leadership offices

POSITIONS

Certain positions were more likely to lead to future work as a lobbyist than others. The 377staffers employed in the House in 2009 who left to lobby included 50 legislative assistants, 32 chiefs of staff, 26 legislative directors, and 22 staff assistants.Of the 25 most common staff titles, the titles most likely to lead to staffers becoming lobbyists within the 2-year period were “Counsel” (11.2% became lobbyists), “Legislative Director” (8.9% became lobbyists), and “Legislative Counsel” (8.8% became lobbyists). Eight percent of both the chiefs of staff and the deputy chiefs of staff employed in mid-2009 became lobbyists. Interestingly, as we noted in our recent analysis of House operating budget cuts, salaries for "Counsel" positions had suffered the most between 2009 and 2011, down 5.8%. There is probably some connection.

Table 5. Rate of staffers becoming lobbyists, by selected positions

CONCLUSIONS

The revolving door continues to spin. Since July 2009, almost 400 individuals employed as House staffers at the time have left to become registered lobbyists, primarily working for lobbying firms, corporations, and business associations.In many respects, Congress continues to operate as a farm team for future lobbyists. Staff build up contacts and policy and political expertise. Then they often go “downtown” and cash in, taking their expertise and networks with them.

Though a certain flow of personnel from Congress to K Street is inevitable, Congress ought to do more to hold onto experienced staff. Recently, we explored retention rates among House staff, and we found that offices that paid their staff more had slightly higher retention rates, though Hill salaries lag behind private sector comparisons.When staff leave to lobby, their former offices must find somebody new and usually less experienced. And offices who lack staff with policy expertise and political relationships often must rely more on outside lobbyists, who are only too happy to fill the gap.For a complete list of all 378 staffers, what office they worked in, and where they went to lobby, click here.

METHODOLOGY AND DATA

These results are based on a comparison of House disbursement data from the third quarter of 2009 with public lobbying records. One challenge in conducting this analysis is that we are matching on names, and sometimes individuals register as lobbyists under different name permutations than they were listed on the Hill. We do our best to correct for this, but there are limitations. We also note that because certain names are more common than others, there is always the possibility of false positive matches.

Additionally, since our data on staff come from the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer of the U.S. House of Representatives, we are dependent on what the House reports. We must in good faith disclose that the underlying data are messy. At best, the data are approximate, and higher levels of confidence in it can only come when the House of Representatives makes a better effort with respect to how it normalizes and releases the data to the public. To dig through the data yourself, visit our House Expenditure Reports Database.

Special thanks to Daniel Schuman and Alison Rowland for their help on this analysis.

UPDATE: Jennifer Taylor, a legislative assistant in Rep. Pingree's office, shares a name with Jennifer Taylor, a lobbyist at Van Scoyoc & Associates, resulting in a false positive. The text of this post has been corrected to reflect this. As noted above, our analysis is limited by the quality of the data published by the House disbursement reports and the Senate Office of Public Records. We regret the error and encourage anyone with clarifying information to contact us.

Today NPR's Planet Money team aired a story about disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s legal lobbying activities (as few of those as there may have been), highlighting how problematic even currently legal lobbying practices are. Also today, the New York Times pointed out some of the huge loopholes in current lobbying law -- Newt Gingrich, for example, isn’t actually a lobbyist, he just spends lots of his time talking to lawmakers about how policy should be made. Y’know, as a historian.

The powerful (and corrupting, as we saw with Abramoff) influence of special interest money in politics can be extremely hard to follow, but better lobbying laws could change that. Lobbying activity is the most tangible means to measure the money and effort that powerful interests are spending to influence lawmakers.

Closing the loopholes that let “historians” like Newt Gingrich act as stealth lobbyists and creating real-time, online disclosure about just who lobbyists are meeting with and what they’re talking about would be a powerful first step to shining a light on who’s actually influencing our lawmakers.

How do we fix it? A good first step, as Daniel wrote the other day, is the Lobbying Disclosure Enhancement Act, introduced by Rep. Quigley. The bill needs your help to get more support in Congress. You can write to your rep right from OpenCongress.org to ask them to co-sponsor the bill. You can also read more about Sunlight’s lobbying recommendations and sign up to get updates on lobbying reform here.

Recent calls for technologists to hire lobbyists to educate Washington on internet issues miss a significant part of the big picture. Congress makes bad technology decisions because it has dismantled its ability to evaluate policy issues. While public mobilization and lobbying efforts can affect decision-making through political pressure, lobbying to educate congress on technology issues is like trying to teach a fish to sing.

The congressional technology lobotomy arose from two fateful decisions. First, Congress closed down its specialized office of nonpartisan technology experts in 1995, which provided a comprehensive view of technology issues. Second, it systematically undermined its remaining staff by spreading them too thin, eroding Congress’s ability to dive deeply into an issue.

The Office of Technology Assessment was created in 1972 to equip Congress with “new and effective means for securing competent, unbiased information concerning the physical, biological, economic, social, and political effects” of technology. OTA “was intended to facilitate congressional access to expertise and permit legislators to consider objectively information presented by the executive branch, interest groups, and other stakeholders to controversial policy questions,” in the words of a CRS report. It was a runaway success.

OTA’s small staff of experts (around 140 at its maximum) generated hundreds of reports at the relatively modest cost of $20 million annually. Unfortunately, it was defunded in 1995 as part of a broader effort to make the Congress appear more efficient. Despite repeated calls for OTA’s reinstatement, nothing has filled the void, and policymaking has suffered.

OTA’s defunded left staffers for committees and individual members of Congress to shoulder the increasingly complicated burden of evaluating technology issues. They are ill-equipped for the challenge. Over the last 25 years, congressional staff salaries have remained flat, with staff spread thin over a wide range of issues. With an average House staffer in a policy-role earning between $40-60,000, attracting and retaining top talent is virtually impossible. With a 10.4% cut in Congress' budget over a two year period that's taking place now, prompting layoffs and pay freezes, the lifeblood of smart decision-making is being drained away.

Increasing lobbying on technology issues is an easy, but ultimately insufficient, response to this problem. $92 million was spent for lobbyists representing for tv/movie/music issues in 2011, which is the same amount spent by telecom services and equipment companies. This monetary arms race may level the playing field for the well-to-do, but it hasn’t created good results. And both sides have good reason to manipulate the law to keep out the next wave of entrepreneurs.

Getting citizens involved will make Congress pay attention, but not every issue is a SOPA, where the internet shuts down in protest. Most issues fly below the radar. Only an empowered, capable Congress can make decisions on the many issues that will never lead to a Google doodle or Wikipedia shut-down.

A smarter Congress requires an investment in its staff, which will save us grief in the long term. Funding for Congress, with all of its supporting agencies, will amount to 1/10 of 1% of federal spending projected for 2012. Current spending on Congress is also roughly the same order of magnitude of what will be spent on all lobbying efforts this year. While lobbyists are necessary for industries like technology and telecommunications to express their views, if we want good policymaking, we need to empower Congress to be able to make good decisions. Restoring funding to OTA and reexamining congressional staff pay is the most effective place to start.

Update: A just released analysis from the Center for Responsive Politics looking at SOPA and PIPA-related lobbying efforts in the 4th quarter. "Companies that lobbied on the two bills spent at least $104.6 million in the fourth quarter of 2011, more than double the $49.3 million they laid out in the previous quarter." The number of lobbyists doubled from 462 to 956.

How much money was directly connected to SOPA and PIPA? CRP says "It's impossible to say...  since the reporting forms don't require that level of detail." Overall, businesses identified as computers/internet spent $125 million on lobbying for 2011, compared to $122 million for tv/movies/internet.

Yesterday evening, John reacted to President Obama's SOTU speech in which the President proposed a ban on lobbyists acting as bundlers. He criticized the proposal as "unlikely to pass Congress, and unlikely to pass muster with the courts." It's true that Congress is unlikely to do much of anything for the remainder of this session, although my bet is that the courts would uphold a bundling ban if it were structured properly. Regardless, focusing on banning lobbyist bundlers is to ignore the elephant in the room: we need to fix who is required to register as a lobbyist in the first place .

Were Congress to act in 2012, the best thing it could do is to tighten the requirement of who must register as a lobbyist so that the Newt Gingriches, Tom Daschles, and other hidden influencers will be brought into the sunlight. There's no doubt that they both have lobbied, at least under the common-sense definition of  "influenc[ing] politicians or public officials on a particular issue." The legal definition says essentially the same thing, but it allows lobbyists to evade registration so long as they avoid either spending 20% of their time lobbying or directly contacting more than 1 covered official. This is incredibly easy to do, and creates loopholes that just about everyone agrees should be closed.

So if we're going to talk about lobbying reform -- and a Pew Charitable Trust survey released Monday says 40% of Americans believe that addressing lobbyist influence is a top priority for 2012 -- the best place to start is with fixing the lobbyist registration and disclosure requirements. President Obama has addressed lobbying reform in the past, most visibly in his 2010 State of the Union speech, and his administration's actions have shown sensitivity to the importance of this issue. But he seems to have gotten sidetracked.

A good place to start is with the Lobbying Disclosure Enhancement Act, introduced by Rep. Quigley, which directly takes on the lobbying disclosure loopholes, as well as Sunlight's recommendations on this issue and the ABA Lobbying Task Force's report. For a primer, watch the Advisory Committee on Transparency's event "Washington's Lobbying Fix," which discusses all of these proposals.