A record of how lobbying is disclosed, and of what the disclosures contain.

Federal lobbying in the United States is governed by disclosure rather than by licence. Three statutes carry most of it: the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, and the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007. Between them they decide who must register, with which office, at what threshold, and how often.

These pages follow that machinery in order — the definitions, the two filing offices, the thresholds that decide who is inside the register and who is not, and the documented cases in which the record reached the public through a court, a committee or a journal instead of a form.

Every figure quoted here comes from a named statute, filing or published report, with its year. Where a case is described, it is described as a court, a committee or a regulator found it.