Not Just the Lobbyists: The Rent-Seeking Machine#

Here’s a number that should stop you cold: the lobbying industry in Washington, D.C. spends more than three billion dollars a year. Three billion. That’s not campaign donations. That’s not PAC spending. That’s just the money spent on professional lobbyists — people whose full-time job is bending legislation.

Now, here’s the question most people ask: “How do we stop the lobbyists?”

Here’s the one they should be asking: “Why is it worth three billion dollars to lobby?”

The answer to the second question changes everything. The lobbying industry isn’t the disease. It’s the symptom. The disease is a government powerful enough to pick winners and losers — one that controls so many levers of economic life that influencing those levers becomes the most profitable investment a corporation can make.

I learned this the hard way, running for office and watching the machine from the inside. What I saw contradicted almost everything I’d believed about how Washington works.

The Market for Influence#

Think of it this way. You run a business, and the government is considering a regulation that’ll cost your industry a hundred million dollars a year. You have two choices. Accept the regulation and eat the cost. Or spend five million on lobbyists to get it softened or killed.

Five million to save a hundred million. A twenty-to-one return. In what universe would a rational business not make that bet?

This is the fundamental dynamic driving the lobbying industry — and the part that nearly every reform effort gets wrong. Reformers focus on lobbyists: their tactics, their access, their revolving-door connections. They propose disclosure requirements, cooling-off periods, gift bans. None of it works. Not because the reforms are poorly designed, but because they’re targeting the wrong side of the equation.

Regulate the supply of lobbying all you want. As long as the demand exists — as long as government decisions are worth billions to the private sector — influence will find a way. Ban registered lobbyists, and you get unregistered consultants. Ban consultants, and you get strategic advisors. Ban advisors, and you get “thought leaders” who happen to have the right committee chairman’s ear.

The influence doesn’t disappear. It just puts on a different suit.

Shadow Lobbying: The Invisible Machine#

This brings me to the part of the lobbying world that keeps me up at night: the part you can’t see.

Registered lobbying — the kind that shows up in disclosure reports and gets covered by journalists — is actually the least dangerous form of influence. Not because it’s harmless, but because it’s visible. You can track it. Report on it. Hold people accountable. Transparency is a limited tool, but at least it’s a tool.

The real action has moved underground. To think tanks producing “independent research” funded by the industries they’re studying. To academic papers reaching policy-relevant conclusions, sponsored by corporations that benefit from those conclusions. To former officials who never register as lobbyists but pull seven-figure incomes providing “strategic advice” to the same industries they once regulated.

This is shadow lobbying, and it’s the fastest-growing sector of the influence economy. It operates in a space that’s perfectly legal, entirely unregulated, and nearly invisible to the public. The people doing it aren’t breaking any rules — they’re just operating in the gap between what the rules cover and what actually happens.

During my time in politics, I watched this machine up close. I saw policy positions that originated in corporate boardrooms get laundered through think tanks, published as academic research, cited by friendly media, and ultimately adopted as “expert consensus” by legislators who had no idea where the idea actually came from.

This machine is running full tilt right now. The farm bill currently moving through Congress includes a provision shielding pesticide manufacturers from lawsuits — a provision POLITICO traced directly to the powerful agriculture lobby. The industry’s fingerprints are all over the language, yet it arrived at the committee as routine legislative housekeeping. Meanwhile, the grassroots MAHA movement that challenged it managed to secure a two-hour White House meeting with RFK Jr. and chief of staff Susie Wiles, as CNN documented — proof that the shadow lobbying pipeline can be disrupted, but only when citizens organize hard enough to kick the door open themselves. The fingerprints were wiped clean at every stage. By the time a proposal reached a congressional committee, it looked like the organic product of independent analysis. It wasn’t.

The Root Cause: Power Creates Its Own Market#

Here’s the insight that changed my thinking — and one that most people, left and right, resist because it challenges their assumptions about how government should work.

Lobbying is a market. Like any market, its size is determined by the value of what’s being traded. What’s being traded in the lobbying market is government decisions — regulations, tax provisions, spending allocations, permits, waivers, exemptions. The more of these decisions government makes, and the more each one is worth, the larger the lobbying market grows.

This isn’t a moral argument. It’s an economic one. Every new regulation creates a new constituency of people who want to shape it. Every new spending program creates a new group of potential beneficiaries jockeying to make sure the money flows their way. Every new tax provision creates a new set of winners and losers who want to land on the winning side.

More government intervention doesn’t reduce rent-seeking. It expands the arena where rent-seeking takes place. The more decisions government makes, the more decisions are worth lobbying for. The more power concentrates in Washington, the more money flows there to influence how that power gets used.

I know this is uncomfortable for people who believe — sincerely, with good intentions — that more government oversight is the answer to corporate influence. But the data tells a different story. The lobbying industry has grown in lockstep with the expansion of government’s regulatory reach. Not because lobbyists are getting greedier. Because the prize is getting bigger.

The Meta-Lobby#

There’s one more layer, and it’s even more troubling. The most sophisticated lobbying doesn’t target specific regulations. It targets the rules that produce regulations.

Think of it as meta-lobbying — lobbying about the process of making policy, not about any particular outcome. If you can shape the regulatory framework — the definitions, the procedures, the criteria — then every future regulation produced within that framework automatically favors your interests. You don’t need to lobby for each individual rule because the rulebook itself has been written in your favor.

This is the highest form of the lobbying art, and it’s nearly invisible to the public. Nobody covers it. Nobody tracks it. It happens in comment periods, technical advisory committees, and standard-setting bodies most Americans have never heard of. But the decisions made in those obscure venues shape billions of dollars in economic outcomes.

I ran into this during my campaigns when I tried to understand why certain industries seemed to win every regulatory battle regardless of which party held power. The answer wasn’t better lobbyists. It was that they’d shaped the field — the definitions, assumptions, and technical standards — so thoroughly that any regulation produced within that field was almost guaranteed to work in their favor.

The Supreme Court case over Roundup and glyphosate is a perfect case study. CNN reported that MAHA activists — the so-called “MAHA moms” — are descending on the Court to challenge an industry that has embedded its safety definitions so deeply into the regulatory framework that the EPA now argues it, not courts, should determine whether a pesticide is dangerous. The meta-lobby didn’t just influence a ruling. It redefined who gets to make the call.

Rethinking the Problem#

So what do we do? If regulating lobbyists doesn’t work because influence just moves underground, and if the root cause is the scope of government’s power to pick winners and losers, then the answer isn’t more regulation of lobbying. The answer is less to lobby for.

I know that sounds like a conservative talking point — maybe it is. But it’s also just math. If the lobbying market is driven by the value of government decisions, then reducing the value of those decisions — by narrowing what government decides — reduces the incentive to lobby.

You don’t solve a rat problem by building better rat traps. You solve it by removing the food.

This doesn’t mean dismantling government. It means being ruthlessly honest about which functions are essential and which have become feeding troughs for well-connected interests. It means asking, every time a new regulation is proposed: “What lobbying market does this create? Who will spend money to influence this? And is the public benefit worth the rent-seeking cost?”

These aren’t easy questions. They don’t have clean answers. But they’re the right questions — and the ones almost nobody in Washington wants to ask, because the current system works very well for the people who run it.

The fight against lobbying corruption isn’t a fight against lobbyists. They’re rational actors responding to incentives. The fight is against the incentive structure itself. Change the incentives, and you change the behavior. Leave the incentives in place, and no amount of regulation will stop the machine.

It’ll just make it harder to see.