Lobbying Data

Bill Allison
By way of background
Im not a developer
Once upon a time, I
worked with very
smart developers
My job was to vent my
frustrations as a
reporter
Also to say what kind
of stories I couldnt do
Developers and I
worked to make those
Real time
One early experiment
Aggregate spending by
super-PACs
We could also show by
race
Who was spending, who
was targeted
Hugely popular in the
2010 race
I became obsessed with real-time
data
In 2012, we did the entire
FEC site
Outside spenders,
campaigns, parties, PACs
Downloadable data
The idea was to track
everything as it hit the
FEC site
Also to aggregate
numbers quickly
We tried the same thing for
enterprise
This is, or was, Influence
Explorer
Find out information on a
companys:
Campaign contributions (federal &
state)
Lobbying (federal only)
Comments on federal regulations
Contracts & grants (federal only)
EPA violations
Federal advisory committee
members
But as I said, Real Time obsessed
me
Sadly, I cant show you
how we aggregated
real time lobbying data
We focused on
registrations
Aggregated general
issue data
Led to us doing stories
like this one
One of the most poisonous towns in
the world
So I noticed in the weekly
tracker a spike in a
category
It was foreign relations
It was all the same
company
I asked Keenan Steiner to
look into it
Heres what he found
With lobbying, theres a huge
problem
Dont mean to go all Derrida
on you, but the problem is
words
There are too many of them
on a lobbying disclosure page
How do you figure out what a
company is really lobbying on?
This if from Boeing Q1 2017
I chose this one because it
would fit on one page (many
are longer)
 Problem: Definition of lobbying
Its not just influencing an
issue
Researching an issue
Monitoring legislative
activity
Dont get me started on
how squishy definitions in
LDA are
Theres a lot of squish in
lobbying data
How about dollar figures?
Apples, oranges, xylophones + (yes)
fake numbers
Four different ways of
reporting totals
Yes Im showing only
three
Outside lobbyists use
LDA definitions
None remotely
comparable
And some dollar
figures are really
phony
A hat I wear at Bloomberg
How do you figure all
this out?
How do you separate
signal from noise?
Why did so many
Renaissance Tech
people give so much
money?
Donations a clue?
Major donors from
RenTech
Robert Mercer
James Simons
Henry Laufer
Sandor Strauss
If you have answers
ballison14@bloomberg.net
Cell: 703-362-9883
Twitter: @bill_allison
Normal email: bill_allison@me.com