Lobbying Intelligence MCP Server

Lobbying Intelligence

Federal lobbying disclosures filed under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA). ~108K filings per year, two years loaded. Sourced from the US Senate Office of Public Records LDA filings API and refreshed weekly.

Free, no authentication required.

What's in a filing

Each LDA filing represents lobbying activity by one registrant (the lobbying firm) on behalf of one client (who paid). It includes:

• Registrant and client identity (with client country for foreign-principal filings)
• Period and filing type
• Income or expense amount (the LDA's $5K reporting thresholds apply)
• Lobbying activities — issue codes (e.g. TAX, HCR, DEF), specific issues, and the named lobbyists working the issue
• Government entities targeted (House, Senate, agencies — e.g. Treasury, FDA, USTR)

A filing is identified by a UUID assigned by the LDA system.

Filing types

Quarterly activity (Q1–Q4) is where the actual lobbying happens; registrations (RR) just establish the relationship and usually have no spending.

Capabilities

• Search by registrant — fuzzy match on lobbying firm name. Optional filters: year, filing_type. Returns filing list with client, period, amount, issue codes, lobbyist count.
• Search by client — fuzzy match on the organization that hired the lobbyist. Optional filters: year, client_country (e.g. Japan, Saudi Arabia) for foreign-principal disclosures.
• Get filing by UUID — full filing detail: registrant + client identity, income/expense, every lobbying activity with issue codes and government entities, full lobbyist roster.
• Dataset statistics — totals, unique registrants, unique clients, filings by year, last refresh.

Workflows

Who lobbies for X: Search by client name → list every registrant they've engaged, with issue codes and spending per quarter.

What is firm Y working on: Search by registrant → list active clients, total spend, and issue mix. Drill into a specific filing UUID for the full activity detail (issues, lobbyists, agencies targeted).

Foreign influence: Search by client with a client_country filter to find filings on behalf of foreign governments or foreign-controlled entities.

Issue tracking: Surface filings by registrant or client, then read the activity blocks on the filing detail — issue codes (TAX, HCR, IMM, etc.) and free-text issue descriptions show what was lobbied; the government-entities list shows which committees and agencies were targeted.

Spending leaderboard: Use registrant search across a year, then aggregate amount across the returned filings. (The dataset has no built-in ranking endpoint; ranking is a client-side aggregation.)

Gotchas

• Reported income/expense, not market truth — the LDA permits rounding to the nearest $10K and self-reporting; figures are the floor, not the ceiling, of actual spend.
• Registrant ≠ client: searches that look like a single name (e.g. "Comcast") usually want the client search, because Comcast hires outside firms; those firms are the registrants.
• Year filter applies to filing year, not activity year — a Q4 2023 filing is filed in early 2024 but covers Q4 2023 activity. Treat both years as plausible when narrowing.
• No registration row does not mean no lobbying — only activity above LDA thresholds is reportable; in-house lobbying below the threshold or grassroots activity is invisible to this dataset.
• Government entity names vary — "House of Representatives" and "U.S. House of Representatives" appear; substring/contains matching on the entities array is more reliable than exact equality.