> OpenAI nearly doubled its federal lobbying expenditure to a record $2.22mn in the first half of 2026, compared to last year, while Anthropic nearly tripled its spending to $3.53mn, according to federal disclosures.
Never ceases to amaze me how cheap lobbying is. That's pocket change for these companies.
Lobbying expenditures are given to lobbyists not politicians. You're primarily paying for the salary of some humanities or social science majors and their travel expenses, which isn't that much money.
This should be a basic fact. If those who spend a good portion of time being angry at lobbyists yet intelligent enough to make mid-six figures conflate bribery with lobbying, it should be no surprise the corporations have captured the government. The general public has essentially zero civic understanding while corporations are able to hire the few that do.
> Lobbying expenditures are given to lobbyists not politicians. You're primarily paying for the salary of some humanities or social science majors and their travel expenses, which isn't that much money.
I don't think these are the only expenses, why should politician listen to them if lobbyists are not promising them support in next elections in the form of marketing, payments for expenses and so on
> why should politician listen to them if lobbyists are not promising them support in next elections in the form of marketing, payments for expenses and so on
Mostly because those things are directly illegal. Lobbying organizations (and PACs and SuperPACs etc.) are very limited in what they can provide either as direct monetary contributions or in-kind gifts to a candidate. The restrictions here are basically the same as those on an individual, but usually with more strict reporting requirements and lower limits.
The marketing aspect is the only thing that they can legally provide, and that's less a lobbying function than a PAC function, and they are not allowed to coordinate with the campaign or the candidate on this.
Well a funding a PAC that supports a specific candidate/party who gets elected because of that effectively accomplishes the same thing. Of course the salary the company "buys" for them isn't exactly in the same magnitude as a direct bribe could potentially be (on the upper end at least).
First, the inability to coordinate with the candidate on marketing doesn't strike me as much of an obstacle to SuperPAC effectiveness. Second, the Supreme Court ruled this summer that political parties cannot be prevented from coordinating campaign spending with candidates in NRSC vs FEC.
Yes, you're right, they could just do this, and then spend the rest of their term thrown out of Congress and rotting in prison.
That is, they can hold such a lunch, but they can't pocket the money personally or even have the money contributed towards their campaign. Pocketing the money personally is just bribery, having it contribute to their campaign would violate the contribution limits (typically ~$10,000 per election max, though less than that in reality because the limit is split between primary and general).
You're right to be slightly suspicious because these lunches do exist. But they don't go to the campaign or the candidate, they can go to PACs and SuperPACs or to the party. In tern, PACs and SuperPACs cannot give this money to the candidate or the campaign (same limits as above with higher reporting requirements) and cannot coordinate campaign messaging.
This is not to say that corruption doesn't exist -- just that this simplistic form of it does not exist. You'll have to dig deeper than looking at lobbying activities to find the actual corruption, and it's usually masked in revolving door arrangements, speaking fees, and bulk sales of vanity books. But none of that can go through the typical lobbying system because it's too tightly regulated and tracked.
> A federal jury convicted Menendez on 16 felony counts. These included bribery, extortion, conspiracy, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and acting as a foreign agent.
Seems you have to go all out before the comprendes?
It's not as if being elected is the end all and be all to being a politician. Politicians have a vague idea of how they want to shape society, but they can't be experts in completely unrelated subjects of healthcare, military, AI infrastructure etc. A good lobbyist will help a politician achieve these goals in the field of their expertise (or at least try to convince the politician that they're helping).
Why lobbyist can't just present their ideas publicly, like do a public free lessons to politicians and anyone who wants to attend, if they're so eager to teach politicians?
Let them publicly say whatever they're preaching to politicians, and instead of 'funding' politicians directly, let them just teach everyone all at once.
I would love to hear what AIPAC teaches politicians
That's literally what 90% of lobbying is. Powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers, econometrics research publications, policy panels and conferences, and so on. Not everything is campaign donations and super PACs.
Why any lobbyists should have 1:1 time with a politician, what are they hiding?
For one thing because it’s a right in the First Amendment, there next to freedom of religion and speech.
If you have a grievance, you have a right to petition to have it redressed. Like other rights recognized in the Constitution, courts have interpreted it broadly, to include such things as a right for a private citizen to meet 1:1 with a willing public citizen.
I should think the point was obvious. It's not a percentage of behavior of a single participant, it's in aggregate. The point is 90% of lobbyists are not doing anything untoward.
> Why lobbyist can't just present their ideas publicly, like do a public free lessons to politicians and anyone who wants to attend
Different people (including politicians) have different priorities, assumptions, biases, etc. The argument that convinces one person won't land with someone else. The true value of a lobbyist is her ability to understand what a politician values, and present the argument that is convincing to him.
As an example: I met an EU citizen who thought fishing with hooks was immoral. It seemed cruel to her to put a hook in the fish's face. She traveled to the US to ask senators to ban it. Amazingly, she went to a few effective altruist meetups, networked her way into contacting the staff of two US senators, and managed to get meetings with both of them. But neither one introduced legislation for her.
What arguments could she have made?
1. The vegan argument: It is wrong to eat animals or make them suffer.
2. The environmental case: Humans should leave nature alone.
3. The public safety case: Some rivers have toxins that may accumulate in fish. Only a strict licensing system can keep people from fishing in polluted rivers, selling the fish to people who don't know the river had bad stuff in it, and getting sick.
<<I could come up with many more, but you get the idea...>>
She believed in the vegan argument. No senator agreed with her. A good lobbyist would have told her:
"Senator X cares about the environment. Make the environmental case, and he is likely to listen to you. His constituents are not interested in veganism, and he wins elections by talking about standing up for the interests of ranchers. The vegan argument will not work, do not bring it up!"
Tailoring arguments to your audience can be dishonest if you take it too far. Not tailoring your argument at all is certain to fail: US Senators are busy. Handing them a 60 item list of all possible arguments, some of which they think are crazy, will cause them to ignore you.
I don't have any issues with them teaching politicians, but nothing should be hidden from public. let them do everything in public, because public needs to know what their representatives are doing.
this is also good for documenting and tracing arguments and facts.
At your job, would you like your 1 on 1s to be publicly available to the world? Are you even able to have a productive discussion when you're second guessing how other may react to what you're saying? Now imagine you're a politician with an army of enemies ready to clip anything you say out of context.
> I would love to hear what AIPAC teaches politicians
Thanks for bringing AIPAC up because it illustrates my point. AIPAC has plenty of publicly available material for you to read. It's not going particularly specific, but it most likely broadly aligns with what their lobbyists discuss with politicians: Israel is a valuable intelligence partner, aid to Israel brings stability in the Middle East, Iran is a destabilizing force that needs to be kept in check, etc.
How much merit do these arguments have? Maybe some. Maybe little at all. Even so, there is no mistaking that APAIC is talking about Earth here. The same cannot be said about the pro Palestinian side in America. "Stop funding genocide" is a fundamentally contradictory. The entire basis for a overwhelmingly better armed Israel giving Palestinians any sort of autonomy at all rests on American security commitments to Israel.
Even ignoring financial issues, people are generally willing to talk to major groups or industries. You tend not to get re-elected if you ignore everyone.
> They are interested in learning about topics from credible people
Honestly, you surprised me with this statement alone. interested in learning? do you think Trump wants to learn anything from AIPAC? or Pharma lobby or Military Industrial complex?
What do politicans want to learn from Military Industrial complex or AIPAC lobby for example? What's there, that politicians don't know already?
> > They are interested in learning about topics from credible people
> Honestly, you surprised me with this statement alone. interested in learning?
> do you think Trump wants to learn anything from AIPAC?
> or Pharma lobby or Military Industrial complex?
Trump is unusually sure of himself. But no man rules alone: There is a massive org under every president trying to run a government. I know for a fact that people two levels of management under Trump (i.e. Trump is their manager's manager) do take meetings with people who lobby on the issue of health care policy and (for and against) military procurement. I would be shocked if people who are for/against working with Isreal are never in a room with anyone who can set policy.
Imagine that it is your job to come up with policy for a bug expensive government program: The VA hospital system, a military procurement program that buys airplanes, the part of the state department focused on MENA, etc. If someone asks to meet, claiming that they did academic/technical work which shows you can get a better result with a policy change, you will take that meeting. Examples:
1. An MD researcher shows you can cut drug costs by switching one medication for another.
2. An engineer has reason to believe current stealth coatings on fighter planes won't work against China's missiles in 5 years.
3. An economist thinks that an ally (Isreal, Korea, etc.) have demographics that will stop them from being able to field an army within 20 years.
You should go into these meetings with skepticism, and there is a 90%-99% chance the person's idea is bad. But if an idea is good/correct/important, and you blew him off, your boss will be angry, and your career will be over.
Most people in government want to solve problems (and get credit for doing so). Most problems governments face have hard tradeoffs that voters don't understand/care about. Voters want unlimited healthcare at no cost to themselves, 100% success thwarting terrorists with no spying on citizens, military supremacy without paying much for weapons, etc. People asked to solve these problems are DESPERATE for new ideas to allow voters to see that they are getting good outcomes. Telling them you have a way around a hard tradeoff is music to their ears.
Thanks for the detailed comment. And I would describe lobbying as making sure when the opportunity arises your solution has a voice in that discussion.
Yes it sucks. But this is a human problem. Not a US gov problem.
The faintest whiff of a potential incentive wafted beneath the nose of an entrepreneur is enough to bring into motion the invisible hand. This is HN, that's what we do here. We assume that it is the same for politicians.
Lobbyists are in the business of wafting. It is quite enough for them to bring credible rumors of corporate agenda and plans to spend in pursuit of them. Political entrepreneurs will move to capture that spend without a single back-alley transaction involving burlap sacks of cash with comically large $ signs printed on the side. It has the same effect, though.
That is a hopelessly naive description of lobbying, to the point that I assume you are being intentionally disingenuous. Lobbyists commonly funnel money to politicians via fundraiser bundling, donations to outside spenders like PACs, and other mechanisms that get around the weak remaining restrictions on direct campaign contributions that SCOTUS has not yet gutted. A lobbyist may not donate directly to a politician's campaign, but they get a group of their friends together for a fundraiser to effectively donate on their behalf (bundling). Or they donate to outside groups who then spend to support the politician's campaign, e.g. by funding advertising that benefits the candidate or hurts their opponent. Like when AIPAC sinks millions into ads against progressive candidates, that's tightly connected to their lobbying on behalf of Israel and you better believe that the politicians benefiting from that spending are well aware of how it is connected to their willingness to adopt the lobbyists' positions.
How should politicians be informed on these topics for which they are attempting to regulate? What's the alternative?
I think its entirely reasonable that the industries affected by regulations spend money to combat incorrect information like water usage of data centers.
That isn't entirely accurate. They at least need enough domain knowledge to tell if an expert witnesses is bullshitting them. Or to understand the jargon being used.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam Smith
It really irks me for some reason that American Medical Association (one of the top spenders in lobbying) is doing the lobbying. I did a quick Gemini/Google search and these are the topics they lobby for.
```
Core Legislative PrioritiesMedicare Reform:
Fighting to fix stagnant physician payment formulas and account for inflation.
Prior Authorization: Pushing to reduce administrative roadblocks and delays enforced by insurance companies.
Scope of Practice: Opposing laws that expand independent clinical roles for non-physicians like nurse practitioners and pharmacists.
Burnout Reduction: Supporting federal and organizational relief to help doctors manage workplace stress and administrative tasks.
--
Public Health and Science
Public Health Crises: Supporting science-based policies on vaccinations, gun violence prevention, and chronic disease reduction.
Digital Health: Guiding regulations for artificial intelligence and telehealth integration in medical practices
```
Most of these are about keeping the gate (i.e., doctor's compensation high). The US doctors are the highest paid in the world (among developed countries like UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, etc.) by a long shot. Kind of mad if you think about it.
Disclaimer: My spouse is a specialist doctor. You can say I have selfish interest in keeping doctor's salaries high in the US. But I can't help highlighting that doctor's guilds (like AMA) are part of the reasons why the healthcare expenses are so high in the US.
One of the ways that the AMA gatekeeps is to limit the number of medical school seats and residency slots in the US (residency is run by Medicare).
Quality of life (at work) for many physicians is arguably pretty bad due to long hours, administrative requirements, and insurance requirements / prior auth. Physicians should lobby to get some of these things fixed by regulation, because it's likely the only way they will get fixed! However, a physicians lobby of any kind is going to have a tough time reducing healthcare costs because they have a significant financial incentive to gatekeep and their members can pay high dues to spend a lot on lobbying.
I wonder if the AI meant PAs instead of pharmacists -- as I understand it, a pharmacist's scope of practice is quite distinct from a physician.
Yeah, doctors have been wilding and it's curious how completely they have been able to avoid public backlash for it. Probably some combination of knowing your doctor and more strongly associating billing/insurance with the financial pain even though providers are a big part of the cost spiral.
I already pay for my government in taxes (which ironically these big cos don't pay).
Besides, if I were to gather up 4 million to lobby, the opposition would simply spend 8 million instead which they could come up with just as easily. They don't have to outrun the bear, the just have to outrun you.
j/k, but then again, it's not like we have other means to "help make good governance decisions" that we haven't already tried before. Maybe except the failed cybernetics experiments that came a little before their time and in the wrong political regime, but then those are effectively replicated by any large multinational internally to some extent.
Right. That's what actually buys you the politician. Being able to promise "Pass this regulation for us and we'll make sure you are set up for life, since we know it's politically unfavorable"
the ~$2M just gets your foot in the door, that's it.
That's the real evil. Once a super PAC has enough money, they don't even have to spend it. The threat alone is enough to get most Congress people back in line.
This is what a PAC is. Political Action Committee.
They primarily only get headlines for outrage topics when people don’t like what they’re pushing toward. Many of the top PACs are from groups like realtors or sheet metal workers lobbying for their interests.
Most people skip PACs and donate straight to political candidates instead. Individual donations to candidates outweigh anything the AI companies are spending by a huge number.
> Letting mega-billionaires spend mega-millions to buy the conversation around elections isn't my definition of freedom.
Spell out the details: Exactly who will not be permitted to speak under your definition of "freedom"?
If you say that only people with a billion dollars can be punished for speaking: Do you think the limit won't be lowered over time?
If the issue is that no person should be able to spend more than N million dollars in one "conversation", how do you allocate broadcast licenses when the price in an auction would be more than N million?
America wasn't a democracy before the 2010 Citizens United ruling allowed corporations and wealthy donors to spend unlimited money on elections? That's news to me.
I don't feel more free at all on account of that ruling. Maybe if you said "freedom" one or two more times, that would do the trick.
"The political action committee emerged from the labor movement of 1943. The first PAC was the CIO-PAC, formed in July 1943 under CIO president Philip Murray and headed by Sidney Hillman. It was established after the U.S. Congress prohibited unions from giving direct contributions to political candidates."
The above from Wikipedia.
But I'm wasting my time talking to you, you are just raging and putting words into other people's mouths, because you are too high on your own supply of resentment to want to have a good discussion.
I'll put my opinion clearly: Everybody should have the freedom of association and be able to get together with likeminded to work for any political cause they want to advance, as long as they do it within the limits of just law.
Political donations by large groups of special interests aren't unique to America. Many countries have very strong labour union super-PACs.
I think of that Netflix series on FIFA and its rampant corruption. The bribes in question are laughable, considering that FIFA is a multi-billion dollar operation, and it's always some round number like $1M. At least add some cents to it so it's not glaringly obvious in the bank accounts.
Are the bribes round, or is it just usual bullshit journalism practice of fudging the numbers and rounding them in the process (usually made apparent when there are multiple reports for the same number, each using different units of currency or measure).
The estimated spending on the 2026 election season is $11.6 billion [1]. One primary has had an estimated $60 million spent on it (ie the Michigan Democratic primary). Thomas Massie's primary had an estimated $35 million spent on it. A GOP Super PAC has earmarked $342 million for 8 Senate races [2].
Over $5 billion was spent on lobbying in 2025 [3].
To truly move policy you need to get pliable representatives first and that's not just money. There is a pipeline here. First, you get the right connections. That could be coming from a wealth family, be the nephew or grandson of some politician, do your time as a staffer or whatever. Going up through the ranks acts as a giant filter to make sure you will maintain the status quo. So you have to find candidates to run for these offices who have been weeded out by the existing processes. And if you don't have enough of them, the DNC or RNC will spend selectively against you in the primary and general election. And an increasing number of races have over $100 million spent on them.
Buying back democracy would be very, very expensive.
And then after all that there's the income and jobs pipeline. Your children get six-figure jobs with think tanks and interested companies. You leave office and get placed on boards of large companies. You can't compete with that.
It seems to me that there's really nothing at that store that "normal people" want to buy.
Everything that we want to do can be done through ordinary collaboration with no need for the state. The special services which the state provides (violence and threats of violence, imperialism, inhibition of movement of people and goods across imaginary lines, etc) are the kinds of things that are really only interesting to the kinds of people who are already spending their money on lobbying.
It would not surprise me that the cost of lobbying rises exponentially as the policy moves left on the political spectrum. That pro-business, pro-austerity, neo-liberal policy is orders of magnitude cheaper to lobby for, then pro-worker, pro-democracy, pro-consumer policy.
I thought it was obvious but I'll spell it out. Businesses do what's good for the business. Often, happily, that turns out to be to the benefit of consumers. But that is never the objective. Businesses take anti-consumer decisions every day with no qualms when it serves them.
"Pro business is pro business" was my reply to your naive "Pro business is pro consumer" declaration of faith.
My second sentence clarified that my first sentence carried no judgement of businesses. That's just their nature, it's what they do.
It seems like the empirical fact that lobbying is cheap is at odds with your apparent assumptions about the value companies gain from lobbying. Does that fact make you rethink your notion of what lobbying actually entails?
Lobbying is cheap because it’s just making powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers. It’s helping them identify where the pre-existing political fault lines are and arming them with ammo for fights that will play out according to existing ideological positions. “K Street lobbyists” don’t even bill at the rates you see for corporate lawyers. $3 million per six months is what a company like Anthropic might burn in a single B2B lawsuit.
If it's just making powerpoint presentations why do AI companies whose whole raison d'etre is that they can make these powerpoints in seconds for pennies spend millions on lobbying instead? Lobbying is cheap because it identifies the relatively small number of leverage points it takes to send society down one track instead of another and targets the spending there. Buy the right guy dinner and you get what you want just the same as if you'd spent billions on ads to convince millions of people to vote for the guy who's gonna do what you want.
> If it's just making powerpoint presentations why do AI companies whose whole raison d'etre is that they can make these powerpoints in seconds for pennies spend millions on lobbying instead?
Because you need meat puppets to identify what arguments are going to be compelling to which politicians, and go into an office and spoon feed it to the staffers.
> Lobbying is cheap because it identifies the relatively small number of leverage points it takes to send society down one track instead of another and targets the spending there. Buy the right guy dinner and you get what you want just the same as if you'd spent billions on ads to convince millions of people to vote for the guy who's gonna do what you want.
If that were true, then the price of doing that would get bid up. It's extremely rare that you have an issue where there's not people with deep pockets on both sides of the issue.
Compared to the bailout they're going to get at some point, because they're vital to national security and whatever, I think you could easily be looking at a 1000x+ return on investment on those numbers.
These numbers are so small that I'm doubly ashamed of all the corruption happening. If politicians at least sold out for fuck-you money, I'd understand, but no.
That's what my microeconomics professor said shortly after Citizens United. "If political campaigns were that good of an investment, they'd be investing more!" ...and then they did. Outside spending absolutely took off after 2010 and shows no signs of slowing down. The conclusion he jumped to was false and it was false because he ignored the possibility that price discovery might take a while.
> "Add up all US spending on candidates, PACs, lobbying, think tanks, and advocacy organizations – liberal and conservative combined – and we’re still $2 billion short of what we spend on almonds each year."
People need to look at financial kick backs. There is a certain
guy here in central Europe who left politics quite recently, but
suddenly has 400 million euros wealth - out of nowhere. And
nobody questions how he got that ...
The corruption happens not only via direct lobbyism. One has to
look at the whole corruption bribe bubble here.
Funding their reelection, industry "connections" making it easy for you or your relatives to get jobs or make profitable investments, opportunities to get speaking fees after you leave office and similar perfectly legal things are probably much more common than cash bribes.
>Add up all US spending on candidates, PACs, lobbying, think tanks, and advocacy organizations – liberal and conservative combined – and we’re still $2 billion short of what we spend on almonds each year.
Alternatively, couldn't this be seen as evidence on favor of the "corporate narrative" on lobbying? Namely, that the purpose of lobbying is to ensure politicians have instant and easy access to high-quality, insider information relevant to their decision-making on corporate issues (as opposed to simply being bribed)?
I remember my poli sci teacher on college tried very hard to convince the class of this (with little success).
I have a family member who's a lobbyist. When he talks about his job, a common theme is that a huge amount of his work is trying assess the impacts of policy on businesses (albeit mainly big businesses) and make sure lawmakers are able to take that into consideration. I don't know how well that represents lobbying as a whole, but that part always made sense and didn't seem like a bribe.
Several million dollars, as mentioned in the article, could easily be the cost of paying, e.g., 20 people to perform and communicate an assessment, as opposed to a direct "donation" to a politician. It's not said where that money was spent.
My ex worked at Congress for a few years so I got a little bit of view on the inside. There are a lot of lobbyists who do honest work and try to present correct data. Same for politicians. A lot of them (most?) really want to do a good job and make the country better. But, like in corporations, it's the psychopaths that only care for their own benefit and nothing else, who make it to the top and get to make the big decisions.
My ex was around when they worked on Obamacare. There were a lot of really good ideas floating around that had broad buy-in but then the super partisans and corrupt (say Lieberman and Baucus) destroyed it and created a big, but profitable for some, mess.
And with the increased spending after Citizens United it's only going to get worse.
I never understood that narrative either. You won't get high quality information from someone that is paying you for influence. You will get a lopsided/biased perspective, and the unwritten expectation is you will use it or contributions will cease.
Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance on any given issue or policy, for free. They want to be involved for the same reason they lobby.
The same could be said about the judicial system though, right? Both the prosecution and defense are paid to influence the judge, and will naturally provide a biased perspective. But that doesn't mean there's not high quality information within.
I don't think biased information is a total dead end, but the onus is just on judges and politicians to tease out information from more than one angle. And often they don't.
It's up to the congressman to weight all evidence and data available and come to well informed conclusion. If they are incapable or unwilling to do that that's a different issue.
> Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance
They are inherently incapable of identify all these companies or measure the impact of their policies on their own, though (which is perfectly understandable, well I guess these days they can use an LLM to make this easier... /s)
Because lobbying is essentially just the process of petitioning the government. Mostly.
It's buying dinners so you can talk with a Representative or Senator one-on-one. It's traveling to D.C. or the Congressperson's home state. It's paying for studies and etc to support your points. It's financing campaigns of politicians who already agree with your viewpoints. It's not "here's money, make law".
It's also financing campaigns of politicians who don't agree with your viewpoints in the (fully justified) hope that they'll look upon you more favorably if they win. It's thinly veiled promises of cushy jobs after they leave office, if they play ball.
It always has been. Frankly, sometimes they don't even spend anything at all at lower levels, it's just a conversation, a meeting with an animatronic bureaucrat high on their own self-importance and power, in a mandatory spending jukebox of incompetence and failure. I have seen people squander millions simply because they were too incompetent to properly run an organization, plan, and budget and they needed to spend the money merely so it is not taken from them next budget cycle. I am also witness to corruption and nepotism that wildly enriches people merely because doing so is easy and does not require actual work.
The return on "lobbying" for corporations is immense, actually, it's a bit of a high cost, high return with some risks type of dynamic; but especially in the Beltway bandit den and increasingly in the silicon cartel valley they have worked out a systematic methodology for bamboozling and manipulating utterly inadequately prepared bureaucrats squandering other people's money with approaching zero consequences. No, even they not only don't face consequences, they are promoted faster the better and faster they can squander money and enrich friends and associates.
For technical minded US folks who read about this and are outraged and/or interested in how they can do more politically, I highly recommend checking out fellowship programs like TechCongress and Horizon which place technical experts in Congress for a year (disclosure, I'm an alum) and have become critical sources of expertise in a world dominated by nontechnical folks. TechCongress applications for next year closed, but I believe Horizon's are still open.
I've always wondered: is this actually wanted? I ask because I live in a low population state where it's fairly easy to make contact with politicians' offices and there have been various cases over the years where I've noticed things occurring that seem off from a technical perspective, and have offered to help. Nobody ever seemed interested, which led me to believe their incentives lie somewhere other than "getting things right" or "learning the truth". (both parties, fwiw).
I did this in Oregon earlier this year for legislation that sat at the intersection of tech and surveillance. I am currently a registered lobbyist as a consequence of those efforts (for which I have been paid $0).
In my experience, yes, it is actually wanted. But, it's not enough to just offer to help. Legislative processes are very very human -- i.e., you have to spend time in person, meeting people, getting to know people, remembering their names and faces and trivia about them, building relationships. When you're not doing that, you have to be making informational materials. And when you're not doing that, you have to be building influence in whatever community or subject area you're trying to represent the interests of.
It would be really wonderful to see more people with the means to do so getting involved in this way. One of the reasons everything seems to be getting worse in so many areas is that most of the people doing this work aren't doing it on behalf of the interests of the average person.
Yes, I would echo that -- it's not something that I think is helpful to just drop into and offer specific technical expertise, but it is very much wanted if you're willing to build longer term relationships to understand the politics, office, and interests that all come wrapped up in a bill and the legislative process
If you had read that the EFF was meeting with lawmakers in the US to convince them that there was no secure way to allow the government to break e2e encryption, or had read that academics were banding together to ask the government not to make open weight LLMs illegal, what would your reaction be? What if told you that those organizations had actually paid a consultant to help them navigate getting appointments with the lawmakers?
Lobbying can be bribery, and that’s bad. Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest is definitely less bad.
The alternative that many people claim to want (no lobbying or money in politics legally) is a lot closer to what is happening in more authoritarian regimes. If there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so, political purity and perfect congressional understanding of nuanced topics doesn’t magically appear.
> Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest
And I believe that if it were that above-board then many fewer people would complain. But it's not.
Because the professional will host a fancy dinner that you're invited to. Or they'll make an entirely legal contribution to your re-election fund.
And even if you think all of the above is totally fine, you have to consider whose voices are more loudly heard in this kind of system. Do you, or your neighborhood, or even your city in most cases, have as much money as a megacorporation, to fund all of these activities at a similar scale? Do you think it's right for the richest companies and people to have the most say in how the country is run?
> no lobbying or money in politics legally ... there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so
You could speak your mind at a meeting with a policy maker, rather than at a $500 a plate dinner you've invited them to free of charge. You could pay someone to advocate for your interests in a smart way, without also contributing a million dollars to someone's re-election campaign. If there was less money flowing into politics, it would be more difficult to sway public opinion at large through expensive campaigns.
My quick summary is that I don’t think only wealthy people/companies should have their voices heard. I just don’t think that attempting to squash lobbying or even “money in politics” is the means to achieve it.
I’ve called my congressman/senator a few times to speak for/against something, and it’s made me wish it was easier for citizenry to meaningfully band together. Im glad I had someone to call, but it was certainly not the access that a fancy political dinner would have afforded me.
I despise and fear corruption, and agree that there an overlap between lobbying and bribery/kickbacks. And I don’t think buying the sitting president’s meme-coin should purchase access. But of course we have (had) laws against such blatantly poisonous arrangements. And many legal arrangements are not much better.
So I don’t mean to say that all “lobbying” is good in all forms, but the term has become so conflated with other illegal or borderline activities, that it’s actually lost meaning, and is actively harming our ability to meaningfully discuss it. It wouldn’t surprise me if this conflation benefits the very criminals that we wish to shut down.
When someone uses ambiguous terms like “money in politics” or “lobbying” to mean everything from running a newspaper ad to slipping someone an envelope full of cash, we will see calls for blunt instrument fixes. Those fixes usually benefit incumbents and existing power structures, and often happen to make it illegal to amplify one’s speech. There are plenty of countries that have very little legal money in their political system, but they also don’t have elections that can be swayed in the first place.
We would see less money in politics if the government was weaker and could not sway an individual’s or company’s fortunes by millions of dollars at the stroke of a pen, or declare that encrypted communications are illegal, or decide that certain ethnic groups are no longer welcome. But since they can, many companies or individuals or civil liberties groups will do the math and purchase whatever insurance they can to increase the chance their side is heard, whether we agree with that side or not.
I wish I had better proposals to fix the things we agree are bad, because we probably agree on a lot of it. I am mainly trying to call out that saying someone or some group is “lobbying” is NOT the same thing as accusing someone of being inherently corrupt, and the fact that it “sounds” like it is just benefits the actually obvious corrupt criminals and disadvantages anyone else who would want to use money to advocate for a position.
You're making this very dichotomous, but I'm not convinced. Why shouldn't there be a way to bring issues to the parliament's attention without private money? For example, while flawed, the EU's Citizens' Initiative approach seems to be doing some good work bringing attention to issues that are in the public interest. I'd encourage us to look more extensively into these sort of open initiatives.
I certainly don’t think that this should be the only way to talk to a lawmaker! I should be able to schedule time to go meet with my representatives or his/her people. I should also be able to pay someone to do so on my behalf.
I’m not familiar with the Citizen’s Initiative approach! I’ll look into it, and agree we should have more organized and official ways of doing it. I have called my congressman and senator’s office a couple of times in the US, and it doesn’t feel very productive. I wish it was easier to organize a group to make our concerns known.
Speaking of the EU, I have been surprised to watch the ChatControl stuff keep resurfacing and be struck down over and over and over again. It feels very much like the “government” wants something that the citizens and their private companies do not. Perhaps it is a result of lobbying for it by private interests, but it seems like an effort by the current powers that be to overstep what people would otherwise want to “lobby against”.
Lobbying, as it is practised in the US, is hardly better than bribery. Talking to lawmakers about what is exclusively in your best interest, to the exclusion of everything else, is harmful. You wind up leveraging a group collective's understanding of dishonesty and dark speech patterns. No citizen has the eloquence or bull pulpit to oppose this.
That said, this is how the US works now. It might have started with military-industrial companies, but it is basically wide spread. Unfortunately, once the taboo is broken, it is broken permanently.
Anthropic has been pretty transparent that their plan for dealing with Chinese open models is regulatory capture. All the fear-mongering and posturing that AI is so dangerous only they can be trusted with it. They want to legislate their competition away, at least in a few markets. OpenAI has been more subtle about it.
It's a dangerous gamble, and bad for the US. But, given how cheaply many of our politicians can be purchased and how much money is flowing into the leading AI companies (and a bunch of also-rans), I guess we should expect to see them rolling the dice on that gamble.
You would think if the general public actually wanted this, lobbying wouldn't be necessary. Call your reps. Let them know how you feel about intellectual property theft, wage theft, ecological impacts, and the intentional erosion of the voting power of the majority in modern democracy.
It is hard to find actual data that supports the claim that calling your congressperson matters, mostly the internet is full of anecdata and wishful thinking.
Effective altruism has some data that suggests it works marginally for state leglislators but works quite well for undecided federal officials.
There are ways to fix this, in theory, but our government has passed the point of no return with corruption.
There is one solution: no one register as a democrat or republican: this would make the dirty D.C. system a little harder to corrupt the system.
Unfortunately, people let their emotions guide them in thinking about political parties. Most people are idiots who can’t see how they are divided into two groups and manipulated.
Too bad, this used to be a nice little country we had.
This is axiomatic -- organizations are going to spend some proportion of the money they have to bribe politicians in their favor, modulo the RoI which will vary a bit case to case. Therefor the more money the organization has the more they're going to be bribing. AI companies at present have tons of money. Taken to the limit you get AIPAC.
That's not new though. Washington succumbed to bribes decades ago already.
It just is much more apparent now with the orange king and his billionaire
bodies. The Epstein network must be much bigger than what is already known.
It is also most likely still existing today, just with different actors.
Billionaires want to party - often with people below a certain age ...
My latest Epstein WTF moment: moot (yeah, the guy from 4chan). Epstein even drive him back home... /pol/ was created a few days later. Qanon went on to start there, before moving to 8chan, a competitor bought by Jim Watkins (and certainly Bannon behind him).
It was always the era of lobbying, now you just shower the gold-obsessed king with tribute — crypto, ballroom funds, a private jet — in order to buy a presidential decree.
Just lay gold and silver at the feet of the monarch and wait for your royal pardon or policy favor.
> OpenAI nearly doubled its federal lobbying expenditure to a record $2.22mn in the first half of 2026, compared to last year, while Anthropic nearly tripled its spending to $3.53mn, according to federal disclosures.
Never ceases to amaze me how cheap lobbying is. That's pocket change for these companies.
Lobbying expenditures are given to lobbyists not politicians. You're primarily paying for the salary of some humanities or social science majors and their travel expenses, which isn't that much money.
This should be a basic fact. If those who spend a good portion of time being angry at lobbyists yet intelligent enough to make mid-six figures conflate bribery with lobbying, it should be no surprise the corporations have captured the government. The general public has essentially zero civic understanding while corporations are able to hire the few that do.
> Lobbying expenditures are given to lobbyists not politicians. You're primarily paying for the salary of some humanities or social science majors and their travel expenses, which isn't that much money.
I don't think these are the only expenses, why should politician listen to them if lobbyists are not promising them support in next elections in the form of marketing, payments for expenses and so on
> why should politician listen to them if lobbyists are not promising them support in next elections in the form of marketing, payments for expenses and so on
Mostly because those things are directly illegal. Lobbying organizations (and PACs and SuperPACs etc.) are very limited in what they can provide either as direct monetary contributions or in-kind gifts to a candidate. The restrictions here are basically the same as those on an individual, but usually with more strict reporting requirements and lower limits.
The marketing aspect is the only thing that they can legally provide, and that's less a lobbying function than a PAC function, and they are not allowed to coordinate with the campaign or the candidate on this.
Well a funding a PAC that supports a specific candidate/party who gets elected because of that effectively accomplishes the same thing. Of course the salary the company "buys" for them isn't exactly in the same magnitude as a direct bribe could potentially be (on the upper end at least).
First, the inability to coordinate with the candidate on marketing doesn't strike me as much of an obstacle to SuperPAC effectiveness. Second, the Supreme Court ruled this summer that political parties cannot be prevented from coordinating campaign spending with candidates in NRSC vs FEC.
> Mostly because those things are directly illegal
Ah yes, said politician will just host a $100,000 a head luncheon so nobody is “bribing” them. That would be dirty.
Yes, you're right, they could just do this, and then spend the rest of their term thrown out of Congress and rotting in prison.
That is, they can hold such a lunch, but they can't pocket the money personally or even have the money contributed towards their campaign. Pocketing the money personally is just bribery, having it contribute to their campaign would violate the contribution limits (typically ~$10,000 per election max, though less than that in reality because the limit is split between primary and general).
You're right to be slightly suspicious because these lunches do exist. But they don't go to the campaign or the candidate, they can go to PACs and SuperPACs or to the party. In tern, PACs and SuperPACs cannot give this money to the candidate or the campaign (same limits as above with higher reporting requirements) and cannot coordinate campaign messaging.
This is not to say that corruption doesn't exist -- just that this simplistic form of it does not exist. You'll have to dig deeper than looking at lobbying activities to find the actual corruption, and it's usually masked in revolving door arrangements, speaking fees, and bulk sales of vanity books. But none of that can go through the typical lobbying system because it's too tightly regulated and tracked.
> A federal jury convicted Menendez on 16 felony counts. These included bribery, extortion, conspiracy, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and acting as a foreign agent.
Seems you have to go all out before the comprendes?
It's not as if being elected is the end all and be all to being a politician. Politicians have a vague idea of how they want to shape society, but they can't be experts in completely unrelated subjects of healthcare, military, AI infrastructure etc. A good lobbyist will help a politician achieve these goals in the field of their expertise (or at least try to convince the politician that they're helping).
Why lobbyist can't just present their ideas publicly, like do a public free lessons to politicians and anyone who wants to attend, if they're so eager to teach politicians?
Let them publicly say whatever they're preaching to politicians, and instead of 'funding' politicians directly, let them just teach everyone all at once.
I would love to hear what AIPAC teaches politicians
That's literally what 90% of lobbying is. Powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers, econometrics research publications, policy panels and conferences, and so on. Not everything is campaign donations and super PACs.
you can be good law obeying citizen 99% of the time and in 1% of the time bribe someone to do illegal things. what's your point with 90%?
Why any lobbyists should have 1:1 time with a politician, what are they hiding?
Why any lobbyists should have 1:1 time with a politician, what are they hiding?
For one thing because it’s a right in the First Amendment, there next to freedom of religion and speech.
If you have a grievance, you have a right to petition to have it redressed. Like other rights recognized in the Constitution, courts have interpreted it broadly, to include such things as a right for a private citizen to meet 1:1 with a willing public citizen.
I should think the point was obvious. It's not a percentage of behavior of a single participant, it's in aggregate. The point is 90% of lobbyists are not doing anything untoward.
> Why lobbyist can't just present their ideas publicly, like do a public free lessons to politicians and anyone who wants to attend
Different people (including politicians) have different priorities, assumptions, biases, etc. The argument that convinces one person won't land with someone else. The true value of a lobbyist is her ability to understand what a politician values, and present the argument that is convincing to him.
As an example: I met an EU citizen who thought fishing with hooks was immoral. It seemed cruel to her to put a hook in the fish's face. She traveled to the US to ask senators to ban it. Amazingly, she went to a few effective altruist meetups, networked her way into contacting the staff of two US senators, and managed to get meetings with both of them. But neither one introduced legislation for her.
What arguments could she have made?
She believed in the vegan argument. No senator agreed with her. A good lobbyist would have told her:"Senator X cares about the environment. Make the environmental case, and he is likely to listen to you. His constituents are not interested in veganism, and he wins elections by talking about standing up for the interests of ranchers. The vegan argument will not work, do not bring it up!"
Tailoring arguments to your audience can be dishonest if you take it too far. Not tailoring your argument at all is certain to fail: US Senators are busy. Handing them a 60 item list of all possible arguments, some of which they think are crazy, will cause them to ignore you.
I don't have any issues with them teaching politicians, but nothing should be hidden from public. let them do everything in public, because public needs to know what their representatives are doing.
this is also good for documenting and tracing arguments and facts.
At your job, would you like your 1 on 1s to be publicly available to the world? Are you even able to have a productive discussion when you're second guessing how other may react to what you're saying? Now imagine you're a politician with an army of enemies ready to clip anything you say out of context.
> I would love to hear what AIPAC teaches politicians
Thanks for bringing AIPAC up because it illustrates my point. AIPAC has plenty of publicly available material for you to read. It's not going particularly specific, but it most likely broadly aligns with what their lobbyists discuss with politicians: Israel is a valuable intelligence partner, aid to Israel brings stability in the Middle East, Iran is a destabilizing force that needs to be kept in check, etc.
How much merit do these arguments have? Maybe some. Maybe little at all. Even so, there is no mistaking that APAIC is talking about Earth here. The same cannot be said about the pro Palestinian side in America. "Stop funding genocide" is a fundamentally contradictory. The entire basis for a overwhelmingly better armed Israel giving Palestinians any sort of autonomy at all rests on American security commitments to Israel.
Even ignoring financial issues, people are generally willing to talk to major groups or industries. You tend not to get re-elected if you ignore everyone.
They are interested in learning about topics from credible people that impact businesses and voters,
If the only motivation you can ascribe is making money or relection, it is circular. Wealthy people spend money to become politicians.
> They are interested in learning about topics from credible people
Honestly, you surprised me with this statement alone. interested in learning? do you think Trump wants to learn anything from AIPAC? or Pharma lobby or Military Industrial complex?
What do politicans want to learn from Military Industrial complex or AIPAC lobby for example? What's there, that politicians don't know already?
> What's there, that politicians don't know already?
They need to be ‘reminded’ of the issues that ‘campaign contributions’ are contingent upon.
They want to know what voters and business leaders care about. It’s in their interest for their reputation and succees.
> > They are interested in learning about topics from credible people
> Honestly, you surprised me with this statement alone. interested in learning? > do you think Trump wants to learn anything from AIPAC? > or Pharma lobby or Military Industrial complex?
Trump is unusually sure of himself. But no man rules alone: There is a massive org under every president trying to run a government. I know for a fact that people two levels of management under Trump (i.e. Trump is their manager's manager) do take meetings with people who lobby on the issue of health care policy and (for and against) military procurement. I would be shocked if people who are for/against working with Isreal are never in a room with anyone who can set policy.
Imagine that it is your job to come up with policy for a bug expensive government program: The VA hospital system, a military procurement program that buys airplanes, the part of the state department focused on MENA, etc. If someone asks to meet, claiming that they did academic/technical work which shows you can get a better result with a policy change, you will take that meeting. Examples:
You should go into these meetings with skepticism, and there is a 90%-99% chance the person's idea is bad. But if an idea is good/correct/important, and you blew him off, your boss will be angry, and your career will be over.Most people in government want to solve problems (and get credit for doing so). Most problems governments face have hard tradeoffs that voters don't understand/care about. Voters want unlimited healthcare at no cost to themselves, 100% success thwarting terrorists with no spying on citizens, military supremacy without paying much for weapons, etc. People asked to solve these problems are DESPERATE for new ideas to allow voters to see that they are getting good outcomes. Telling them you have a way around a hard tradeoff is music to their ears.
Thanks for the detailed comment. And I would describe lobbying as making sure when the opportunity arises your solution has a voice in that discussion.
Yes it sucks. But this is a human problem. Not a US gov problem.
What about Crypto lobbying. What do you think switched Trump's position on cryptocurrencies, did he learn you can scam people legally?
You are right, my apologies. Indeed he learned something from them
I suspect he learned it was popular with his base.
The faintest whiff of a potential incentive wafted beneath the nose of an entrepreneur is enough to bring into motion the invisible hand. This is HN, that's what we do here. We assume that it is the same for politicians.
Lobbyists are in the business of wafting. It is quite enough for them to bring credible rumors of corporate agenda and plans to spend in pursuit of them. Political entrepreneurs will move to capture that spend without a single back-alley transaction involving burlap sacks of cash with comically large $ signs printed on the side. It has the same effect, though.
That is a hopelessly naive description of lobbying, to the point that I assume you are being intentionally disingenuous. Lobbyists commonly funnel money to politicians via fundraiser bundling, donations to outside spenders like PACs, and other mechanisms that get around the weak remaining restrictions on direct campaign contributions that SCOTUS has not yet gutted. A lobbyist may not donate directly to a politician's campaign, but they get a group of their friends together for a fundraiser to effectively donate on their behalf (bundling). Or they donate to outside groups who then spend to support the politician's campaign, e.g. by funding advertising that benefits the candidate or hurts their opponent. Like when AIPAC sinks millions into ads against progressive candidates, that's tightly connected to their lobbying on behalf of Israel and you better believe that the politicians benefiting from that spending are well aware of how it is connected to their willingness to adopt the lobbyists' positions.
Can you explain what you mean by
>some humanities or social science majors
this? Im sensing some meaning towards you calling out their degrees.
Your comment implies you have some deep civic understanding so can you expland on what your POV is? Im not american and would like to konw.
How should politicians be informed on these topics for which they are attempting to regulate? What's the alternative?
I think its entirely reasonable that the industries affected by regulations spend money to combat incorrect information like water usage of data centers.
> How should politicians be informed on these topics for which they are attempting to regulate?
Provide them a bigger budget to hire their own staffers, who can do research?
Produce more non-partisan, publicly-funded research, data, and surveys?
Make them study themselves? How do judges get informed on topics they attempt to pass judgement on?
> Make them study themselves? How do judges get informed on topics they attempt to pass judgement on?
They get expert witnesses. They certainly don't "do their own research"
That isn't entirely accurate. They at least need enough domain knowledge to tell if an expert witnesses is bullshitting them. Or to understand the jargon being used.
Exhibit A: https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/19/16503076/oracle-vs-googl...
It's so cheap that normal people could band together and re-buy democracy. It's the banding together part that is hard.
Many of the groups that spend the most on lobbying are composed of "normal" people who have banded together for some common interest. For example:
- The AARP ($21M annual spend) has 38M members
- The National Association of Realtors ($54M annual spend) has 1.5M members
- The American Medical Association ($24M annual spend) has 300K members
Of course that doesn't mean that their interests necessarily align with your interests.
Also if they want my money then their interests align.
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam Smith
A curious choice of quote on a tech forum attached to a VC firm :P
You know what would be cool? A national startup accelerator!
It really irks me for some reason that American Medical Association (one of the top spenders in lobbying) is doing the lobbying. I did a quick Gemini/Google search and these are the topics they lobby for.
``` Core Legislative PrioritiesMedicare Reform:
Fighting to fix stagnant physician payment formulas and account for inflation.
Prior Authorization: Pushing to reduce administrative roadblocks and delays enforced by insurance companies.
Scope of Practice: Opposing laws that expand independent clinical roles for non-physicians like nurse practitioners and pharmacists.
Burnout Reduction: Supporting federal and organizational relief to help doctors manage workplace stress and administrative tasks.
-- Public Health and Science
Public Health Crises: Supporting science-based policies on vaccinations, gun violence prevention, and chronic disease reduction.
Digital Health: Guiding regulations for artificial intelligence and telehealth integration in medical practices ```
Most of these are about keeping the gate (i.e., doctor's compensation high). The US doctors are the highest paid in the world (among developed countries like UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, etc.) by a long shot. Kind of mad if you think about it.
Disclaimer: My spouse is a specialist doctor. You can say I have selfish interest in keeping doctor's salaries high in the US. But I can't help highlighting that doctor's guilds (like AMA) are part of the reasons why the healthcare expenses are so high in the US.
One of the ways that the AMA gatekeeps is to limit the number of medical school seats and residency slots in the US (residency is run by Medicare).
Quality of life (at work) for many physicians is arguably pretty bad due to long hours, administrative requirements, and insurance requirements / prior auth. Physicians should lobby to get some of these things fixed by regulation, because it's likely the only way they will get fixed! However, a physicians lobby of any kind is going to have a tough time reducing healthcare costs because they have a significant financial incentive to gatekeep and their members can pay high dues to spend a lot on lobbying.
I wonder if the AI meant PAs instead of pharmacists -- as I understand it, a pharmacist's scope of practice is quite distinct from a physician.
Yeah, doctors have been wilding and it's curious how completely they have been able to avoid public backlash for it. Probably some combination of knowing your doctor and more strongly associating billing/insurance with the financial pain even though providers are a big part of the cost spiral.
It's a "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" variant, I think. "Temporarily embarrassed parent of a future doctor".
I already pay for my government in taxes (which ironically these big cos don't pay).
Besides, if I were to gather up 4 million to lobby, the opposition would simply spend 8 million instead which they could come up with just as easily. They don't have to outrun the bear, the just have to outrun you.
Yeah, I would like my taxes to go to paying for expertise to help make good governance decisions, personally.
Oh so you're aligned with AI lobbying then?
j/k, but then again, it's not like we have other means to "help make good governance decisions" that we haven't already tried before. Maybe except the failed cybernetics experiments that came a little before their time and in the wrong political regime, but then those are effectively replicated by any large multinational internally to some extent.
Normal people can't offer speaking fees, consulting gigs, and other sinecures to politicians and their staffers after they leave the government.
Right. That's what actually buys you the politician. Being able to promise "Pass this regulation for us and we'll make sure you are set up for life, since we know it's politically unfavorable"
the ~$2M just gets your foot in the door, that's it.
And also they can threaten to fund an opponent's PAC.
That's the real evil. Once a super PAC has enough money, they don't even have to spend it. The threat alone is enough to get most Congress people back in line.
Or primary you
Opponents run in primaries too, not just general elections.
This is what a PAC is. Political Action Committee.
They primarily only get headlines for outrage topics when people don’t like what they’re pushing toward. Many of the top PACs are from groups like realtors or sheet metal workers lobbying for their interests.
Most people skip PACs and donate straight to political candidates instead. Individual donations to candidates outweigh anything the AI companies are spending by a huge number.
Yes, and it’s trivial to form one! If you look up the documentation necessary you may not believe your eyes.
Why should it be hard? It's something which should be completely unregulated in a free country.
Letting mega-billionaires spend mega-millions to buy the conversation around elections isn't my definition of freedom.
> Letting mega-billionaires spend mega-millions to buy the conversation around elections isn't my definition of freedom.
Spell out the details: Exactly who will not be permitted to speak under your definition of "freedom"?
If you say that only people with a billion dollars can be punished for speaking: Do you think the limit won't be lowered over time?
If the issue is that no person should be able to spend more than N million dollars in one "conversation", how do you allocate broadcast licenses when the price in an auction would be more than N million?
Overturn Citizens United.
Which people do you allow to work together for their political goals then, oh grand hacker?
Do you understand the basics of a free society, which include freedom of association? You don't have much of a democracy left if you remove that.
America wasn't a democracy before the 2010 Citizens United ruling allowed corporations and wealthy donors to spend unlimited money on elections? That's news to me.
I don't feel more free at all on account of that ruling. Maybe if you said "freedom" one or two more times, that would do the trick.
"The political action committee emerged from the labor movement of 1943. The first PAC was the CIO-PAC, formed in July 1943 under CIO president Philip Murray and headed by Sidney Hillman. It was established after the U.S. Congress prohibited unions from giving direct contributions to political candidates."
The above from Wikipedia.
But I'm wasting my time talking to you, you are just raging and putting words into other people's mouths, because you are too high on your own supply of resentment to want to have a good discussion.
I'll put my opinion clearly: Everybody should have the freedom of association and be able to get together with likeminded to work for any political cause they want to advance, as long as they do it within the limits of just law.
Political donations by large groups of special interests aren't unique to America. Many countries have very strong labour union super-PACs.
https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs...
No, these do not make me feel free.
I think of that Netflix series on FIFA and its rampant corruption. The bribes in question are laughable, considering that FIFA is a multi-billion dollar operation, and it's always some round number like $1M. At least add some cents to it so it's not glaringly obvious in the bank accounts.
Are the bribes round, or is it just usual bullshit journalism practice of fudging the numbers and rounding them in the process (usually made apparent when there are multiple reports for the same number, each using different units of currency or measure).
Plenty of nice round numbers in this indictment: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/file/450211/dl?inline
Search for “Wire transfer of” to jump to them.
Plus a couple of $1,666,667 which stand out in contrast to all the zeroes.
They are usually round so that those who worked on it can get paid.
And you cannot offer the Kushner family OpenAI shares. The 4 million is just the surface.
That's how Groupon originally started.
The estimated spending on the 2026 election season is $11.6 billion [1]. One primary has had an estimated $60 million spent on it (ie the Michigan Democratic primary). Thomas Massie's primary had an estimated $35 million spent on it. A GOP Super PAC has earmarked $342 million for 8 Senate races [2].
Over $5 billion was spent on lobbying in 2025 [3].
To truly move policy you need to get pliable representatives first and that's not just money. There is a pipeline here. First, you get the right connections. That could be coming from a wealth family, be the nephew or grandson of some politician, do your time as a staffer or whatever. Going up through the ranks acts as a giant filter to make sure you will maintain the status quo. So you have to find candidates to run for these offices who have been weeded out by the existing processes. And if you don't have enough of them, the DNC or RNC will spend selectively against you in the primary and general election. And an increasing number of races have over $100 million spent on them.
Buying back democracy would be very, very expensive.
And then after all that there's the income and jobs pipeline. Your children get six-figure jobs with think tanks and interested companies. You leave office and get placed on boards of large companies. You can't compete with that.
[1]: https://finance.yahoo.com/media-advertising/articles/2026-el...
[2]: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5818507-gop-super-pac-...
[3]: https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying
It seems to me that there's really nothing at that store that "normal people" want to buy.
Everything that we want to do can be done through ordinary collaboration with no need for the state. The special services which the state provides (violence and threats of violence, imperialism, inhibition of movement of people and goods across imaginary lines, etc) are the kinds of things that are really only interesting to the kinds of people who are already spending their money on lobbying.
It would not surprise me that the cost of lobbying rises exponentially as the policy moves left on the political spectrum. That pro-business, pro-austerity, neo-liberal policy is orders of magnitude cheaper to lobby for, then pro-worker, pro-democracy, pro-consumer policy.
Pro business is pro consumer.
Pro business is pro business. That's reality, not a value judgement.
Sorry, I've no idea what either of those sentences are doing.
I thought it was obvious but I'll spell it out. Businesses do what's good for the business. Often, happily, that turns out to be to the benefit of consumers. But that is never the objective. Businesses take anti-consumer decisions every day with no qualms when it serves them.
"Pro business is pro business" was my reply to your naive "Pro business is pro consumer" declaration of faith.
My second sentence clarified that my first sentence carried no judgement of businesses. That's just their nature, it's what they do.
"re-buy democracy"
It says a lot, if you think about it.
It seems like the empirical fact that lobbying is cheap is at odds with your apparent assumptions about the value companies gain from lobbying. Does that fact make you rethink your notion of what lobbying actually entails?
Lobbying is cheap because it’s just making powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers. It’s helping them identify where the pre-existing political fault lines are and arming them with ammo for fights that will play out according to existing ideological positions. “K Street lobbyists” don’t even bill at the rates you see for corporate lawyers. $3 million per six months is what a company like Anthropic might burn in a single B2B lawsuit.
> just making powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers
And how does one get the access to do that?
You can just call them up or email them and schedule a meeting.
> Lobbying is cheap because it’s just making powerpoint presentations to Congressional staffers.
No. It is not. For starters, ask anybody who works at a DC restaurant or sporting venue.
If it's just making powerpoint presentations why do AI companies whose whole raison d'etre is that they can make these powerpoints in seconds for pennies spend millions on lobbying instead? Lobbying is cheap because it identifies the relatively small number of leverage points it takes to send society down one track instead of another and targets the spending there. Buy the right guy dinner and you get what you want just the same as if you'd spent billions on ads to convince millions of people to vote for the guy who's gonna do what you want.
> If it's just making powerpoint presentations why do AI companies whose whole raison d'etre is that they can make these powerpoints in seconds for pennies spend millions on lobbying instead?
Because you need meat puppets to identify what arguments are going to be compelling to which politicians, and go into an office and spoon feed it to the staffers.
> Lobbying is cheap because it identifies the relatively small number of leverage points it takes to send society down one track instead of another and targets the spending there. Buy the right guy dinner and you get what you want just the same as if you'd spent billions on ads to convince millions of people to vote for the guy who's gonna do what you want.
If that were true, then the price of doing that would get bid up. It's extremely rare that you have an issue where there's not people with deep pockets on both sides of the issue.
Compared to the bailout they're going to get at some point, because they're vital to national security and whatever, I think you could easily be looking at a 1000x+ return on investment on those numbers.
These numbers are so small that I'm doubly ashamed of all the corruption happening. If politicians at least sold out for fuck-you money, I'd understand, but no.
Well you don't want to push the price up any more than you have to since then each subsequent lobby will cost a minimum of that amount.
It's pocket change now, but they are lobbying hard now knowing well they won't be able to afford it later.
The real lobbying here is the fact that key politicians own combined billions in AI and related company stock.
Wow - so one really good researchers salary/stock grant. I feel like they're underinvesting...
That's what my microeconomics professor said shortly after Citizens United. "If political campaigns were that good of an investment, they'd be investing more!" ...and then they did. Outside spending absolutely took off after 2010 and shows no signs of slowing down. The conclusion he jumped to was false and it was false because he ignored the possibility that price discovery might take a while.
Tangentially,
> "Add up all US spending on candidates, PACs, lobbying, think tanks, and advocacy organizations – liberal and conservative combined – and we’re still $2 billion short of what we spend on almonds each year."
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
That's most definitely not the real sum.
People need to look at financial kick backs. There is a certain guy here in central Europe who left politics quite recently, but suddenly has 400 million euros wealth - out of nowhere. And nobody questions how he got that ...
The corruption happens not only via direct lobbyism. One has to look at the whole corruption bribe bubble here.
Funding their reelection, industry "connections" making it easy for you or your relatives to get jobs or make profitable investments, opportunities to get speaking fees after you leave office and similar perfectly legal things are probably much more common than cash bribes.
That's like 1 principle engineer. That's it.
Obligatory: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
>Add up all US spending on candidates, PACs, lobbying, think tanks, and advocacy organizations – liberal and conservative combined – and we’re still $2 billion short of what we spend on almonds each year.
My understanding is that you can buy a US Senator for ~ $50K cash in pocket, but with inflation maybe that's gone up too.
Alternatively, couldn't this be seen as evidence on favor of the "corporate narrative" on lobbying? Namely, that the purpose of lobbying is to ensure politicians have instant and easy access to high-quality, insider information relevant to their decision-making on corporate issues (as opposed to simply being bribed)?
I remember my poli sci teacher on college tried very hard to convince the class of this (with little success).
I have a family member who's a lobbyist. When he talks about his job, a common theme is that a huge amount of his work is trying assess the impacts of policy on businesses (albeit mainly big businesses) and make sure lawmakers are able to take that into consideration. I don't know how well that represents lobbying as a whole, but that part always made sense and didn't seem like a bribe.
Several million dollars, as mentioned in the article, could easily be the cost of paying, e.g., 20 people to perform and communicate an assessment, as opposed to a direct "donation" to a politician. It's not said where that money was spent.
My ex worked at Congress for a few years so I got a little bit of view on the inside. There are a lot of lobbyists who do honest work and try to present correct data. Same for politicians. A lot of them (most?) really want to do a good job and make the country better. But, like in corporations, it's the psychopaths that only care for their own benefit and nothing else, who make it to the top and get to make the big decisions.
My ex was around when they worked on Obamacare. There were a lot of really good ideas floating around that had broad buy-in but then the super partisans and corrupt (say Lieberman and Baucus) destroyed it and created a big, but profitable for some, mess.
And with the increased spending after Citizens United it's only going to get worse.
I never understood that narrative either. You won't get high quality information from someone that is paying you for influence. You will get a lopsided/biased perspective, and the unwritten expectation is you will use it or contributions will cease.
Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance on any given issue or policy, for free. They want to be involved for the same reason they lobby.
The same could be said about the judicial system though, right? Both the prosecution and defense are paid to influence the judge, and will naturally provide a biased perspective. But that doesn't mean there's not high quality information within.
I don't think biased information is a total dead end, but the onus is just on judges and politicians to tease out information from more than one angle. And often they don't.
It's up to the congressman to weight all evidence and data available and come to well informed conclusion. If they are incapable or unwilling to do that that's a different issue.
> Congress can and does ask companies for their expertise/stance
They are inherently incapable of identify all these companies or measure the impact of their policies on their own, though (which is perfectly understandable, well I guess these days they can use an LLM to make this easier... /s)
Reminds me of the time Tony Blair left office and went to work for JP Morgan Chase.
https://www.forbes.com/2008/01/10/jpmorgan-consultancy-advis...
Because lobbying is essentially just the process of petitioning the government. Mostly.
It's buying dinners so you can talk with a Representative or Senator one-on-one. It's traveling to D.C. or the Congressperson's home state. It's paying for studies and etc to support your points. It's financing campaigns of politicians who already agree with your viewpoints. It's not "here's money, make law".
It's also financing campaigns of politicians who don't agree with your viewpoints in the (fully justified) hope that they'll look upon you more favorably if they win. It's thinly veiled promises of cushy jobs after they leave office, if they play ball.
It always has been. Frankly, sometimes they don't even spend anything at all at lower levels, it's just a conversation, a meeting with an animatronic bureaucrat high on their own self-importance and power, in a mandatory spending jukebox of incompetence and failure. I have seen people squander millions simply because they were too incompetent to properly run an organization, plan, and budget and they needed to spend the money merely so it is not taken from them next budget cycle. I am also witness to corruption and nepotism that wildly enriches people merely because doing so is easy and does not require actual work.
The return on "lobbying" for corporations is immense, actually, it's a bit of a high cost, high return with some risks type of dynamic; but especially in the Beltway bandit den and increasingly in the silicon cartel valley they have worked out a systematic methodology for bamboozling and manipulating utterly inadequately prepared bureaucrats squandering other people's money with approaching zero consequences. No, even they not only don't face consequences, they are promoted faster the better and faster they can squander money and enrich friends and associates.
Forget the lobby, the parlor is where it's at.
For technical minded US folks who read about this and are outraged and/or interested in how they can do more politically, I highly recommend checking out fellowship programs like TechCongress and Horizon which place technical experts in Congress for a year (disclosure, I'm an alum) and have become critical sources of expertise in a world dominated by nontechnical folks. TechCongress applications for next year closed, but I believe Horizon's are still open.
https://techcongress.io/ https://horizonpublicservice.org/
I'm reading this thinking "hell yes, I should look into this!"
I'm not American. Lol
I should see if there are similar things for Canada
I've always wondered: is this actually wanted? I ask because I live in a low population state where it's fairly easy to make contact with politicians' offices and there have been various cases over the years where I've noticed things occurring that seem off from a technical perspective, and have offered to help. Nobody ever seemed interested, which led me to believe their incentives lie somewhere other than "getting things right" or "learning the truth". (both parties, fwiw).
I did this in Oregon earlier this year for legislation that sat at the intersection of tech and surveillance. I am currently a registered lobbyist as a consequence of those efforts (for which I have been paid $0).
In my experience, yes, it is actually wanted. But, it's not enough to just offer to help. Legislative processes are very very human -- i.e., you have to spend time in person, meeting people, getting to know people, remembering their names and faces and trivia about them, building relationships. When you're not doing that, you have to be making informational materials. And when you're not doing that, you have to be building influence in whatever community or subject area you're trying to represent the interests of.
It would be really wonderful to see more people with the means to do so getting involved in this way. One of the reasons everything seems to be getting worse in so many areas is that most of the people doing this work aren't doing it on behalf of the interests of the average person.
Yes, I would echo that -- it's not something that I think is helpful to just drop into and offer specific technical expertise, but it is very much wanted if you're willing to build longer term relationships to understand the politics, office, and interests that all come wrapped up in a bill and the legislative process
Lots of pitchforks in these comments.
If you had read that the EFF was meeting with lawmakers in the US to convince them that there was no secure way to allow the government to break e2e encryption, or had read that academics were banding together to ask the government not to make open weight LLMs illegal, what would your reaction be? What if told you that those organizations had actually paid a consultant to help them navigate getting appointments with the lawmakers?
Lobbying can be bribery, and that’s bad. Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest is definitely less bad.
The alternative that many people claim to want (no lobbying or money in politics legally) is a lot closer to what is happening in more authoritarian regimes. If there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so, political purity and perfect congressional understanding of nuanced topics doesn’t magically appear.
> Paying a professional to talk to lawmakers about something that is in your best interest
And I believe that if it were that above-board then many fewer people would complain. But it's not.
Because the professional will host a fancy dinner that you're invited to. Or they'll make an entirely legal contribution to your re-election fund.
And even if you think all of the above is totally fine, you have to consider whose voices are more loudly heard in this kind of system. Do you, or your neighborhood, or even your city in most cases, have as much money as a megacorporation, to fund all of these activities at a similar scale? Do you think it's right for the richest companies and people to have the most say in how the country is run?
> no lobbying or money in politics legally ... there is no way to legally speak your mind or pay someone to do so
You could speak your mind at a meeting with a policy maker, rather than at a $500 a plate dinner you've invited them to free of charge. You could pay someone to advocate for your interests in a smart way, without also contributing a million dollars to someone's re-election campaign. If there was less money flowing into politics, it would be more difficult to sway public opinion at large through expensive campaigns.
Yes, these are good points!
My quick summary is that I don’t think only wealthy people/companies should have their voices heard. I just don’t think that attempting to squash lobbying or even “money in politics” is the means to achieve it.
I’ve called my congressman/senator a few times to speak for/against something, and it’s made me wish it was easier for citizenry to meaningfully band together. Im glad I had someone to call, but it was certainly not the access that a fancy political dinner would have afforded me.
I despise and fear corruption, and agree that there an overlap between lobbying and bribery/kickbacks. And I don’t think buying the sitting president’s meme-coin should purchase access. But of course we have (had) laws against such blatantly poisonous arrangements. And many legal arrangements are not much better.
So I don’t mean to say that all “lobbying” is good in all forms, but the term has become so conflated with other illegal or borderline activities, that it’s actually lost meaning, and is actively harming our ability to meaningfully discuss it. It wouldn’t surprise me if this conflation benefits the very criminals that we wish to shut down.
When someone uses ambiguous terms like “money in politics” or “lobbying” to mean everything from running a newspaper ad to slipping someone an envelope full of cash, we will see calls for blunt instrument fixes. Those fixes usually benefit incumbents and existing power structures, and often happen to make it illegal to amplify one’s speech. There are plenty of countries that have very little legal money in their political system, but they also don’t have elections that can be swayed in the first place.
We would see less money in politics if the government was weaker and could not sway an individual’s or company’s fortunes by millions of dollars at the stroke of a pen, or declare that encrypted communications are illegal, or decide that certain ethnic groups are no longer welcome. But since they can, many companies or individuals or civil liberties groups will do the math and purchase whatever insurance they can to increase the chance their side is heard, whether we agree with that side or not.
I wish I had better proposals to fix the things we agree are bad, because we probably agree on a lot of it. I am mainly trying to call out that saying someone or some group is “lobbying” is NOT the same thing as accusing someone of being inherently corrupt, and the fact that it “sounds” like it is just benefits the actually obvious corrupt criminals and disadvantages anyone else who would want to use money to advocate for a position.
You're making this very dichotomous, but I'm not convinced. Why shouldn't there be a way to bring issues to the parliament's attention without private money? For example, while flawed, the EU's Citizens' Initiative approach seems to be doing some good work bringing attention to issues that are in the public interest. I'd encourage us to look more extensively into these sort of open initiatives.
Fair point, and I concede I oversimplified.
I certainly don’t think that this should be the only way to talk to a lawmaker! I should be able to schedule time to go meet with my representatives or his/her people. I should also be able to pay someone to do so on my behalf.
I’m not familiar with the Citizen’s Initiative approach! I’ll look into it, and agree we should have more organized and official ways of doing it. I have called my congressman and senator’s office a couple of times in the US, and it doesn’t feel very productive. I wish it was easier to organize a group to make our concerns known.
Speaking of the EU, I have been surprised to watch the ChatControl stuff keep resurfacing and be struck down over and over and over again. It feels very much like the “government” wants something that the citizens and their private companies do not. Perhaps it is a result of lobbying for it by private interests, but it seems like an effort by the current powers that be to overstep what people would otherwise want to “lobby against”.
Those companies aren't spending millions an year to "paying a professional to talk to lawmakers".
Lobbying, as it is practised in the US, is hardly better than bribery. Talking to lawmakers about what is exclusively in your best interest, to the exclusion of everything else, is harmful. You wind up leveraging a group collective's understanding of dishonesty and dark speech patterns. No citizen has the eloquence or bull pulpit to oppose this.
That said, this is how the US works now. It might have started with military-industrial companies, but it is basically wide spread. Unfortunately, once the taboo is broken, it is broken permanently.
Does not seem like a lot. US Chamber of Commerce spends 600M/year, Meta 160M, Bayer 73M, Toyota 64M. https://www.openlobby.us/clients
Anthropic has been pretty transparent that their plan for dealing with Chinese open models is regulatory capture. All the fear-mongering and posturing that AI is so dangerous only they can be trusted with it. They want to legislate their competition away, at least in a few markets. OpenAI has been more subtle about it.
It's a dangerous gamble, and bad for the US. But, given how cheaply many of our politicians can be purchased and how much money is flowing into the leading AI companies (and a bunch of also-rans), I guess we should expect to see them rolling the dice on that gamble.
You would think if the general public actually wanted this, lobbying wouldn't be necessary. Call your reps. Let them know how you feel about intellectual property theft, wage theft, ecological impacts, and the intentional erosion of the voting power of the majority in modern democracy.
You don’t have credibility. someone in Washington who goes to lunches with senators does.
Yes, call your reps. See if anything changes since the last time you called them.
It is hard to find actual data that supports the claim that calling your congressperson matters, mostly the internet is full of anecdata and wishful thinking.
Effective altruism has some data that suggests it works marginally for state leglislators but works quite well for undecided federal officials.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5oStggnYLGzomhvvn/...
Welcome to our political system.
There are ways to fix this, in theory, but our government has passed the point of no return with corruption.
There is one solution: no one register as a democrat or republican: this would make the dirty D.C. system a little harder to corrupt the system.
Unfortunately, people let their emotions guide them in thinking about political parties. Most people are idiots who can’t see how they are divided into two groups and manipulated.
Too bad, this used to be a nice little country we had.
This is axiomatic -- organizations are going to spend some proportion of the money they have to bribe politicians in their favor, modulo the RoI which will vary a bit case to case. Therefor the more money the organization has the more they're going to be bribing. AI companies at present have tons of money. Taken to the limit you get AIPAC.
And this is after crypto bros spent record sums on lobbying 5 years ago.
That's not new though. Washington succumbed to bribes decades ago already. It just is much more apparent now with the orange king and his billionaire bodies. The Epstein network must be much bigger than what is already known. It is also most likely still existing today, just with different actors. Billionaires want to party - often with people below a certain age ...
My latest Epstein WTF moment: moot (yeah, the guy from 4chan). Epstein even drive him back home... /pol/ was created a few days later. Qanon went on to start there, before moving to 8chan, a competitor bought by Jim Watkins (and certainly Bannon behind him).
is that good
Lobbying should be illegal at this scale.
Everyone should be lobbying. It is the golden era of lobbying with 100% success rates. Whether you are in AI or the lettuce industry.
It was always the era of lobbying, now you just shower the gold-obsessed king with tribute — crypto, ballroom funds, a private jet — in order to buy a presidential decree. Just lay gold and silver at the feet of the monarch and wait for your royal pardon or policy favor.
It was so funny when Apple gave Trump an actual gold bar
I know many people who are using AI, but only a few are actually eating their lettuces, so I guess there's some conflict there