| To find lobbying information, go to the Senate Office of Public Records lobbying database.
Step 1: Choose which criteria to search by. Typically, you will want to look for lobbying reports from a specific time period (either a year or a quarter and a year). Let's say we're going to want reports from 3rd quarter 2009. Under Filings, check off Filing Period and Filing Year.
The database gives you a maximum of 3000 results at one time, so you'll want to narrow it down further. Are you looking for data about a specific issue, a specific company, or a specific lobbyist? Let's say we want information about Monsanto's lobbying. In that case, under Clients, check off Client Name. Then click Submit.
Step 2: At the next screen, you fill out exactly what you're looking for. Our client name is Monsanto, our filing period is 3rd quarter, and our filing year is 2009. Then click submit.
Step 3: At the next screen, here is what you see:
| Registrant Name | Client Name | Filing Type | Amount Reported | Date Received | Filing Year | | Arent Fox LLP | MONSANTO COMPANY | THIRD QUARTER REPORT | | 10/19/2009 | 2009 | | Gallatin Public Affairs | Monsanto Company | THIRD QUARTER REPORT | 10000 | 10/20/2009 | 2009 | | MONSANTO COMPANY | MONSANTO COMPANY | THIRD QUARTER REPORT | 1990000 | 10/20/2009 | 2009 | | Ogilvy Government Relations | MONSANTO COMPANY | THIRD QUARTER TERMINATION | 40000 | 10/19/2009 | 2009 | | Parven Pomper Strategies, Inc. | Monsanto Company | THIRD QUARTER REPORT | 40000 | 10/19/2009 | 2009 | | Russell & Barron, Inc. (formerly Lesher, Russell & Barron, Inc.) | MONSANTO CO | THIRD QUARTER REPORT | 60000 | 10/20/2009 | 2009 | | Sidley Austin LLP | MONSANTO CO | THIRD QUARTER (NO ACTIVITY) | | 10/15/2009 | 2009 | | TCH Group, LLC | Monsanto Company | THIRD QUARTER AMENDMENT | 50000 | 10/20/2009 | 2009 | | TCH Group, LLC | Monsanto Company | THIRD QUARTER REPORT | 50000 | 10/20/2009 | 2009 | | The Nickles Group, LLC | MONSANTO | THIRD QUARTER REPORT | 57000 | 10/19/2009 | 2009 | | The Washington Tax Group LLC | MONSANTO COMPANY | THIRD QUARTER REPORT | 40000 | 10/20/2009 | 2009 | | TROUTMAN SANDERS PUBLIC AFFAIRS GROUP, LLC | Monsanto Company | THIRD QUARTER REPORT | 40000 | 10/20/2009 | 2009 |
Monsanto's been doing a lot of lobbying! Here's how to interpret this table.
1. The Registrant Name is the company that actually did the lobbying. This might be Monsanto (or whichever client name you entered), or it might be a lobbying firm.
2. The Client Name is the party who the lobbying was on behalf of. In this case, Monsanto.
3. The Filing Type will tell you what type of report this is. The quarterly reports are the ones with the most information, so that's what you want to look at. Terminations and registrations don't have much info in them. If you see a Report and an Amendment for the same quarter, pay attention to the Amendment. Presumably the report was filed and then the Amendment was filed to replace the report.
4. The Date Received doesn't matter much to us. That's the date they sent in their lobbying report.
5. The Amount Reported shows how much they spent lobbying. Obviously Monsanto has paid a number of groups to lobby for them, so you'll have to add up all of their various expenditures to find out what they spent total. If the amount is ever blank, that means they spent less than $5000.
6. The Filing Year is the year this report is for. In our case, we're only looking at 2009, so that's the year these are all for.
Step 4: To see which specific issues Monsanto lobbied on and which specific lobbyists were lobbying for Monsanto, double click on any one of these lines in the table (on the Senate Office of Public Records site, not here on my blog) to download an actual lobbying report PDF. I'll do this now for the Arent Fox LLP report.
Step 5: Open the PDF. The first page does not tell you much information you don't already know. Below, that each page will have information for a different category of lobbying. They will tell you which part of the government was lobbied, which issues or bills were lobbied on, and which lobbyists did the lobbying. In this case we have only one page to the report in addition to the first page. It shows lobbying on Agriculture.
On the 2nd page of the report you'll see the following:
15. General Issue Area Code: AGR - Agriculture
(That's the category of lobbying, both the three letter code as well as the name of the category.)
16. Specific lobbying issues: Regulation of biotechnology-derived plants
(That's what Arent Fox LLP lobbied on for Monsanto. It doesn't tell us what position Monsanto took about biotechnology-derived plants, but we can guess.)
17. House(s) of Congress of Federal Agencies: U.S. House of Representatives
(So they were lobbying the House, not the Senate or any part of the executive branch)
18. Name of each individual who acted as a lobbyist in this issue area:
Stanley H. Abramson
(Those are the individual lobbyists who lobbied the House about biotechnology-derived plants on behalf of Monsanto. You'll notice here it says Covered Official Position. If the lobbyists named used to work for the federal government, they are supposed to record what their former job was here. They don't always do this. Sometimes they screw up and instead of listing their previous jobs in the government, they list their current jobs at the lobbying firm. If they leave this part of the form blank, that does NOT mean that they never worked for the government. It just means that you need to look harder to find out if they did.)
Let's do another type of lobbying query. On the lobbyist database, click "Refine Your Search." This time, let's uncheck Client Name and instead check Specific Lobbying Issue (under Filings). Click Submit. On the next screen, type in BPA as the specific lobbying issue and click Submit. The next screen shows you a number of forms where the specific lobbying issues include the word "BPA." This is where using the lobby database becomes a little tricky.
First of all, of the results you get, there may be a reason why somebody used the term "BPA" in their form and they weren't referring to Bisphenol A. To make sure that isn't the case, you'll want to check each of the PDF reports to verify that they were actually lobbying on BPA.
Second, some of the reports may have used the word Bisphenol A instead of BPA, or they may have referred to the Ban Poisonous Additives Act, or even the bill number of the Ban Poisonous Additives Act. You might have to do more than one search using several of these different search terms to find everybody who actually lobbied on BPA. In this case, the American Beverage Association did not come up on my search using the term BPA. Their report says: "S.593 & H.R.1523 - Ban Poisonous Additives Act of 2009 re: product safety" and "S.753 - A bill to prohibit the manufacture, sale or distribution in commerce of children's food and beverage containers composed of bisphenol A." A second search on the term Bisphenol A or the bill numbers or bill names is needed to find them.
Coming up in Part 2: How to identify who individual lobbyists are and where they've worked on Capitol Hill. |
