There are 14,000 lobbying groups in Washington
To see just how ubiquitous lobbying has become in Washington, I make an appointment for lunch with Lee Drutman. He’s a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and the author of “The Business of America is Lobbying.”
He’s waiting for me at the buffet, and we’re about to zero in on the food business: loading up our plates, then dissecting them to see which foods have lobbyists at the table.
Drutman pulls out a laptop with a list of lobbyists, and I tell him what’s on my plate, starting with beef.
“There’s 17 beef organizations here in Washington,” Drutman says. “We’ve got the Center for Beef Excellence, U.S. Premium Beef, Beef Products Incorporated…”
You get the idea. Every single thing on our plates had somebody representing it on Capitol Hill. Sometimes lots of somebodies. For rice, seven associations. Ditto for shrimp.
Some of the trade associations are pretty obscure. Like the International Natural Sausage Casing Association, or the American Dehydrated Onion and Garlic Association.
I reach for a bag of chips, which reminds me: I interviewed the CEO of the Snack Food Association, Tom Dempsey, because I was wondering – what are all these food folks lobbying for? Turns out it’s stuff like labeling on packages, and the federal government’s new dietary guidelines.
“What the association does is tries to stay out in front of issues that may not impact the industry tomorrow but will impact it down the line,” says Dempsey.
Other food lobbyists are focused on some proposed new trade deals. There’s one with Europe that’s gotten the attention of the International Dairy Foods Association — Europe wants to trademark the names of certain cheeses. But there are 35 dairy lobby groups. I ask Dave Carlin, the Association’s chief lobbyist why there are so many.
“We have to tell our story,” he tells me. “Because if we don’t tell our story nobody else will.”
There’s an old saying in Washington: if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu, which brings me back to the buffet, with Lee Drutman.
We’ve started talking money. He says there are 1,114 different food lobbying organizations in Washington, spending about $130 million a year.
Drutman says all the registered lobbyists in town spend about $3 billion a year. I wondered when lobbying got to be such a big business. Drutman says the food folks started around the time of FDR’s New Deal, when a lot of agricultural subsidies were born.
“It caused a lot of people in the agricultural industry to pay attention to politics,” he says.
Drutman says corporations started lobbying more in the ’70s and ’80s, in the wake of increased government regulation. And it’s just kept growing. Now, lobbying kind of feeds on itself.
“Once companies and associations set up shop in Washington they rarely leave because they’ve hired lobbyists who can keep them interested in all the issues,” says Drutman. “So once you start lobbying, you tend to keep lobbying, and there’s a self-reinforcing stickiness.”
Because you certainly don’t want to be the one who’s not at the table.
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