Public Money Radar

$1 to lobby Congress.
Up to $11,000 back in contracts.

What 40 major federal contractors spent lobbying Washington in 2023, next to the federal contracts they received the same year. Raytheon’s ratio topped 11,000x; across all 40 companies the blended return was about 670x. Searchable down to each filing and each award, every number linked to its public source.

Why it saves you time and money: assembling this by hand, 40 companies across two federal databases, entity-resolved and cross-referenced, is days of analyst work or a five-figure data subscription. Here it is already done, and free.

Read this first. Lobbying is legal and fully disclosed, and this is a ratio, not a claim that lobbying bought the contracts. These firms build the actual aircraft, ships, medicine and software, and would win much of this work regardless. The point is to show the scale of the return, plainly, with every figure linked to its source.
Loading public records…
Methodology, sources & how this could be wrong

What this shows

For each company: total disclosed lobbying spending in 2023, and total federal prime-contract dollars obligated to it in calendar 2023. The "return multiple" is simply contracts divided by lobbying.

Sources

  • Lobbying: Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings (lda.senate.gov), summed across a client's 2023 filings (fees paid to outside firms plus in-house lobbying expenses).
  • Contracts: USAspending.gov prime-award obligations for calendar 2023, aggregated by recipient. Individual awards shown are the largest matched contracts; click any of them to open the full record.

How this could be wrong, and where it is imperfect

  • Correlation is not causation. A big return multiple is not evidence that lobbying caused an award. Defense primes earn most of their revenue from the government by building things only they build.
  • Lobbying disclosures cover many issues — taxes, regulation, trade — not only contracts. Attributing all of it to contracts overstates the link.
  • Contract totals count prime obligations only. Money reaching a company as a subcontractor, through a reseller, or through indefinite-delivery vehicles may be missed, which understates some technology and pharmaceutical firms (and can even net negative when prior awards are de-obligated).
  • Recipient matching is by name and can miss subsidiaries or include a namesake. Every line links to its source so you can check it yourself.

Corrections

Found an error? Email mattbusel@gmail.com and it will be reviewed and corrected. Built with the Tensorust data farm, where every record is stored next to its source URL and a content hash.