Lobbying in the United States is no longer a niche activity. In 2024, more than four billion dollars moved through the federal lobbying system alone, and a thirteen-thousand-person workforce of registered lobbyists worked the corridors of Congress and the federal agencies that follow it. None of that is remotely controversial in 2026. What is rarely said in the same conversation is that fewer than three percent of American public charities ever report a single lobbying expense. The system runs on the absence of the people it was designed to serve.

This is a plain-language data brief on the lobbying landscape — what gets spent, who spends it, who does not, and where a small Idaho firm like Anazao Solutions actually fits into the picture for a nonprofit, a regulated provider, or a coalition that has been told it cannot compete. The short version is that the spending gap is real, but the participation gap is larger, and the participation gap is the one a small organization can close.

The federal scale, in actual numbers.

Federal lobbying spending hit $4.4 billion in 2024, the highest annual total ever recorded by the Center for Responsive Politics. That was an increase of roughly $150 million over 2023 and more than $1 billion above the figure from a decade earlier. Federal lobbying spending has exceeded $1 billion every quarter since 2023.1

Combined federal and state lobbying spending in 2024 reached approximately $5.61 billion — about $4.44 billion at the federal level and $1.17 billion across the fifty states. The headcount that produced those numbers was roughly 13,037 unique registered federal lobbyists for the year, also a record high.2

Where the money goes.

The pharmaceutical and health products industry has been the single largest federal lobbying spender every year since 1999. In 2024:

  • Pharmaceuticals and health products: $387.5 million federal.
  • Electronics manufacturing and equipment: $253.4 million federal.
  • Insurance: $155.2 million federal.
  • Oil and gas: $153.2 million federal.
  • Real estate: $150.9 million federal — with the National Association of Realtors alone reporting $86.3 million.

The health sector — pharma, hospitals, HMOs, health services, and health professionals combined — spent $743.9 million on federal lobbying in 2024. As a point of comparison, the entire "Non-profits, Foundations and Philanthropists" category spent $67.8 million federal across 519 clients in the same year.3 The pharmaceutical industry alone outspent the entire American nonprofit and foundation sector on federal lobbying by a factor of roughly 5.7 to 1.

Idaho — a smaller statehouse, a similar ratio.

Idaho requires anyone compensated more than $250 per calendar quarter for lobbying to register with the Secretary of State before engaging in any lobbying activity. Registration is annual, $10 per client, and the public database is maintained at the Idaho Secretary of State's office.4

In the 2025 legislative session, approximately 700 paid lobbyists were registered to work the Idaho legislature — roughly 392 in-state and 300 out-of-state. The Idaho Legislature has 105 members. The ratio is about four registered lobbyists for every legislator. Combined lobbying money tracked through the 2025 session was roughly $2.5 million, with out-of-state organizations outspending in-state organizations on Idaho legislative work.5

The Idaho Lobbyist Manual published by the Secretary of State walks through every step — the LL-1 registration, the periodic LL-2 expense reports, and the post-session L-2 close-out — and Anazao Solutions has a free Idaho lobbyist registration walkthrough that summarizes the post-HB 398 version of the process for new registrants.

Lobbying return on investment — what the research actually says.

The figure most often repeated in mainstream coverage is that lobbying returns roughly $220 for every $1 spent. The number is not a meme. It comes from a 2009 peer-reviewed study by finance professors at the University of Kansas — Raquel Meyer Alexander, Stephen W. Mazza, and Susan Scholz — who measured the returns to corporations that lobbied for the repatriation tax holiday in the 2004 American Jobs Creation Act. The study found a return of more than $220 for every $1 spent on lobbying for that specific provision, a 22,000 percent return on investment.6

A more recent and more conservative analysis from Harvard Business School (Chen, Gunny, and Ramanna, 2014) re-examined similar data using regression methods and found a return closer to $32 per $1 for the median firm with established political relationships.7 Both studies support the same broader point: lobbying produces asymmetric returns for well-resourced actors who show up consistently and know which provisions to attach themselves to.

The figures apply most cleanly to corporations chasing a single tax provision. They are not a promise that any nonprofit can spend $1,000 and recover $32,000. What the research does establish is that policy attention is undervalued, and that the field is built to reward sustained, targeted engagement over time.

The participation gap — where small organizations actually lose.

The single most striking number in the entire lobbying literature is not the spending number. It is the participation number.

  • Fewer than three percent of American public charities reported any lobbying expense on their most recent Form 990 filings.8
  • Only 25 percent of nonprofits reported ever having lobbied in a 2022 Independent Sector survey — down from 74 percent in a comparable 2000 survey.9
  • Only about 1.5 percent of filing public charities have made the 501(h) election that gives them the clearest legal protection for nonprofit lobbying.10
  • Among organizations with budgets above $10 million, 70 percent know they are legally allowed to take public-policy positions and 50 percent know they can formally lobby. Among smaller organizations, only 33 percent know they can take positions and only 24 percent know they can lobby.11

That is the field. A handful of well-resourced industries spend several billion dollars on federal lobbying, and the sector that holds the strongest civic standing — the nonprofit sector — barely shows up. The gap between what is legally permitted and what is actually practiced is enormous.

The spending gap is real, but the participation gap is larger — and the participation gap is the one a small organization can close.

Coalitions — the five-times multiplier.

The Independent Sector data also contains a clear strategic answer. Nonprofits that belong to a local, state, or national coalition advocate or lobby at a rate of 57 percent. Nonprofits operating alone advocate at 12 percent. Belonging to a coalition multiplies the likelihood of any policy activity by nearly five times.9

That number is structural, not motivational. Coalitions provide a few specific things that solo organizations cannot easily produce: shared monitoring of bills and dockets, a drafting bench for comment letters, a standing presence in committee hearings, a roster of credible signatories for joint letters, and a calendar that keeps each member organization accountable to the schedule. Anazao has a separate post on what coalitions actually do — how to build one that does real work — which gets into the operational mechanics.

Where Anazao Solutions shows up for a small organization.

If a nonprofit, regulated provider, or coalition reads the numbers above and wants to actually participate in the policy process — without hiring a six-figure Beltway practice — what Anazao Solutions provides is the operational scaffolding the firm has built specifically for organizations at that size.

Three concrete examples of what that looks like in practice:

One — registration and reporting. The Idaho lobbyist registration, the LL-1 and LL-2 filings, the federal LDA registration and the LD-1 / LD-2 quarterly reports, the 501(h) election filing, the Form 990 Schedule C, and the state-level disclosure forms in any other jurisdiction the organization works in. These are not difficult documents. They are documents that almost no one inside a small organization has the bandwidth to track. Anazao runs the registration calendar and produces the filings on a deadline.

Two — rule-watch and bill-watch. Most of what governs a licensed agency or a regulated provider does not pass the legislature — it comes out of state agency rulemaking. The Anazao IDAPA field guide walks through Idaho's version, and the same approach scales to any state. A small organization that wants to comment on the three or four rules per year that actually affect its work needs a docket-monitoring system. Anazao provides that, with a public-facing tracker and a queue of comment drafts.

Three — committee-cycle communications. The two-week window before a committee markup is when staff actually read constituent correspondence. The day before a vote, an office is briefing from whatever arrived that morning. Anazao writes the position memo, identifies the right committee members, drafts the constituent letter, and queues it for the right week of the cycle. None of this requires a lobbying budget that competes with PhRMA. It requires showing up at the right surface, with the right document, at the right time.

The pitch is not that a small Idaho firm can outspend a national trade association. The pitch is that the firm can put a small organization inside the procedural infrastructure that almost everyone else in the nonprofit sector has chosen to ignore — and that the math of who participates is far more favorable than the math of who spends.

What this looks like inside a year.

A typical first-year scope for a small client at Anazao Solutions includes a quarter of registration and baseline document work, a quarter of bill-watch and rule-watch setup, a quarter of comment-letter and testimony drafting calibrated to the actual committee calendar, and a continuous reporting drumbeat — what was tracked, what was filed, what changed. The numbers above are the reason the work is structured this way. Most of what an organization needs is not a large lobbying budget. It is documentary discipline on a public calendar.

For organizations that want a fuller picture of what Anazao actually does on a day-to-day basis, the services page walks through the firm's three practice areas. The contact page is the door for organizations that want to talk through whether the firm's approach fits the work they need done. There is no obligation in a discovery call, and the firm's discovery process produces a written scope before any engagement begins.

The data on this page comes from the public record. The strategic conclusion comes from years of operations work in the sector. Both point in the same direction.

References

  1. OpenSecrets, "Federal lobbying set new record in 2024" (February 13, 2025). opensecrets.org.
  2. OpenSecrets, "Federal and State Lobbying" data page, 2024 cycle. opensecrets.org.
  3. OpenSecrets, "Non-profits, Foundations and Philanthropists" industry page, 2024 cycle. opensecrets.org.
  4. Idaho Secretary of State, "Lobbyist Information" — registration requirements and public database. sos.idaho.gov.
  5. East Idaho News, "New data visualization shows out-of-state lobbying money flowing into Idaho" (December 5, 2025). eastidahonews.com.
  6. Alexander, Mazza & Scholz, "Measuring Rates of Return for Lobbying Expenditures" (University of Kansas, 2009). SSRN abstract.
  7. Chen, Gunny & Ramanna, "Do Investors Value Political Connections?" Harvard Business School Working Paper 15-050 (2014). Harvard DASH.
  8. Candid, "Nonprofit lobbying: public charities and the data" (May 2026), citing IRS Form 990 Schedule C filings. candid.org.
  9. Independent Sector, "The Retreat of Influence: Nonprofit Advocacy in America" (July 2023). independentsector.org PDF.
  10. Internal Revenue Service, "Measuring Lobbying Activity: Expenditure Test" (501(h) election overview). irs.gov.
  11. Candid, "Nonprofit lobbying knowledge gap by organization size" (2026 data). candid.org.