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Sept. 5, 2014 - MapLight is pleased to announce the launch of its new federal lobbying database. MapLight's searchable dataset on federal lobbying is made freely available through both a Web interface and a CSV downloadable format, and provides timely information on unions, companies and organizations that are lobbying the federal government. It includes information on how much money is being spent, which firms are being hired, which issues are being lobbied on, who is being lobbied, and more.
Journalists can easily search the database for specific unions, companies, and organizations to determine:
• Which K Street organization(s) the latter have hired to lobby on specific issues (e.g., General Electric for defense issues: Gephardt Group Government, Williams and Jensen, William Ball, Fife Strategies LLC, The Ringo Group LLC).
• How much money they spent on lobbying, broken down by quarter (e.g., the National Association of Realtors spent $180 million since 2008; $23 million in the first two quarters of 2014).
For deeper analysis, journalists can download a spreadsheet (CSV file) containing every filing for a given union, company or organization since 2008. Additional information contained in the filings includes:
• Who has been lobbied (e.g., the U.S. Senate, the Securities and Exchange Commission).
• Specific issues being discussed, from taxation and copyright to specific bills in Congress (e.g., the Cyber Information Sharing and Protection Act, Dodd-Frank Act implementation).
• Names of individual lobbyists
Use case: If you were working on a piece on net neutrality you could combine CSV files from companies from a specific industry or set of industries-telecom (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) with cable (Comcast, Time Warner, DirectTV) to uncover trends in specific fields of the data, aggregate totals, and more.
Methodology: MapLight analysis of lobbying disclosure filings from the clerk of the U.S. House of Representatives. Lobbying totals represent money paid by an organization to each lobbying firm for services on all issues. Organizations report total lobbying expenses as a lump sum, which includes both in-house lobbying expenses and amounts paid to (and reported by) lobbying firms they employ.
MapLight calculates a given organization's in-house lobbying expenses by subtracting the total income reported by the lobbying firms it employs from the company's total reported expenses. In general, filers may round their spending and expenses to the nearest $10,000, and MapLight treats the designation of "Less than $5,000" as a value of $0.
MapLight updates its lobbying database daily to capture amendments. Full reports are due on the 20th day of January, April, July, and October.
