Methodology

The source

Every federal profile is built from the United States Senate’s Lobbying Disclosure Act filing system, the official database of disclosures required by the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 as amended. Registrants file quarterly activity reports (form LD-2) and registrations (LD-1) naming their clients, income or expenses, issue areas, the individual professionals involved, their covered government positions, and the federal entities contacted. We retrieve new filings nightly through the Senate’s public API. The site currently holds 4,700 filings, through April 15, 2024.

As the Senate Office of Public Records requires us to note: the Secretary of the Senate’s Office of Public Records cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data has been retrieved from lda.gov. Every filing we cite links back to the original document on lda.gov so you can read the source yourself.

How people are matched across firms

The Senate’s system tracks names on paperwork, not people. When someone moves firms, they appear as a fresh entry at the new firm. We merge entries into one person profile only under strict rules: the names must match exactly after normalization, and the entries must share corroborating history, the same disclosed government career or overlapping client work. Suffixes like Jr. and III never merge. When the evidence is ambiguous, we keep entries separate rather than guess, and flag them for review. A wrong split is an inconvenience; a wrong merge puts one person’s work under another’s name, so we always err toward splitting.

See something merged or split wrongly? Report it and a human looks at it.

What the blurred numbers are

Aggregate figures, like total disclosed spending, are shown in the open. Per-engagement fees are part of the public record too, but we blur them on free pages while the site is in its launch period. The blur is applied before the page leaves our servers; the real numbers are never hidden in the page for someone to uncover. Every figure, blurred or not, traces to a specific filing you can open on lda.gov.

Derived and generated content

Some enrichment is machine-generated and always labeled: industry groupings for clients, sub-issue tags, and profile summaries. These are derived from the text of the filings themselves and never invent facts not present in the record. Career history, client lists, issue areas, dollar amounts, and government positions come directly from filings, not from generation.

Promoted placement policy

Paid placements (Go-Getters and Industry Spotlight) are always labeled Promoted. Payment never changes profile content, ranking in directories, or search results, and it never edits the record.

Coverage and limits

Federal coverage begins with filings from the last three years and grows nightly. Disclosure thresholds mean not all advocacy appears in the record: activity below the statutory registration thresholds is not required to be filed and therefore is not here. State-level registries are planned and will be sourced from official state systems when added. Details on the data itself live on the data page.