Lobbying Activity Monitor — new registrations, quarterly reports and FEC filings

Schedule this actor and get only the new federal lobbying filings for the organisations, lobbying firms or issues you watch, plus new FEC filings for watched political committees. It remembers what it has already reported, so a scheduled run emits only what changed. No login, no API key required.

Sources:

• Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) database — every LD-1 registration (a new lobbyist/client relationship) and LD-2 quarterly activity report (income or expenses, issues lobbied, lobbyist names, agencies contacted), plus amendments and terminations.
• FEC (Federal Election Commission) filings — new reports (F3, F3X, F1, F24, ...) received for the committee IDs you watch, with total receipts, disbursements and cash on hand.

Use cases

• Competitive intelligence — know the day a competitor hires a new lobbying firm, or how much they spent last quarter on which issues.
• Policy and government-affairs teams — track who is lobbying on your issue codes (e.g. TEC, HCR, TAX) and what they describe.
• Journalists and researchers — watch a list of companies, trade groups or firms and get a feed of their filings with links to the source document.
• Campaign finance — get an alert when a watched PAC or campaign committee files a new report.

Input

Field	Default	Meaning
clientNames	["Amazon","OpenAI"]	Organisations that hire lobbyists. Case-insensitive whole-word match on the client name as filed (Amazon matches Amazon Web Services, not Amazonas Holdings).
registrantNames	[]	Lobbying firms or in-house registrants, e.g. Akin Gump.
issueCodes	[]	Senate general issue codes, e.g. TEC, HCR, TAX, DEF, ENG, FIN, TRD, CPI, ENV, IMM. Full list: https://lda.gov/api/v1/constants/filing/lobbyingactivityissues/. Up to 200 of the newest filings are scanned per code per run.
fecCommittees	[]	FEC committee IDs, e.g. C00401224. Look them up at https://www.fec.gov/data/committees/.
lookbackDays	120	Only filings posted within this window are considered.
maxNewPerWatch	5	Cap per watched name, code or committee per run. Filings beyond the cap stay unseen and come out on the next run.
maxItems	10	Overall cap per run.
firstRunMode	emitAll	emitAll emits every current match on the first run; baseline records them silently so only later changes are reported.
webhookUrl	–	POST a JSON summary with the new filings (first 50) after each run.
monitorId	default	Name of the watchlist; each ID keeps its own seen-state.
lobbyingApiKey	–	Optional Senate LDA key (free at https://lda.gov/api/register/). Anonymous access is limited to about 15 requests per minute.
fecApiKey	–	Optional api.data.gov key. Without it the FEC branch uses DEMO_KEY (30 requests per hour), which is enough for a few committees per run.

Output

One record per new filing:

{
  "source": "senate-lda",
  "filingId": "2be0a434-2b24-4ab6-a9cd-a2eee9315eb8",
  "filingType": "Q2",
  "filingTypeName": "2nd Quarter - Report",
  "filingYear": 2026,
  "period": "2nd Quarter (Apr 1 - Jun 30)",
  "postedDate": "2026-07-20T17:24:41-04:00",
  "registrant": "DLA PIPER LLP (US)",
  "client": "OPENAI OPCO, LLC",
  "clientDescription": "AI research and deployment company",
  "incomeUsd": 50000,
  "expensesUsd": null,
  "issues": [{ "code": "CPI", "name": "Computer Industry" }],
  "activityDescriptions": "Issues related to artificial intelligence policy ...",
  "lobbyists": ["JANE DOE", "JOHN ROE"],
  "filingUrl": "https://lda.gov/filings/public/filing/2be0a434-.../print/",
  "matchedWatch": "client:OpenAI",
  "changeType": "new_activity_report",
  "firstSeenAt": "2026-09-29T00:09:14.333Z",
  "monitorId": "default"
}

changeType is new_registration (LD-1 registration or registration amendment), new_activity_report (quarterly report, amendment or termination) or new_fec_filing. FEC rows carry committeeId, committeeName, formType, reportType, coverageStart, coverageEnd, totalReceiptsUsd, totalDisbursementsUsd and cashOnHandUsd instead of the lobbying fields. incomeUsd is what a firm was paid by the client; expensesUsd is what an in-house registrant spent.

Quarterly cadence

Lobbying reports are filed quarterly and posted in the three weeks after each quarter ends (around January, April, July and October 20). Registrations, amendments and terminations arrive year-round. A weekly or daily schedule catches everything; expect most activity-report alerts in those four windows, and use a lookbackDays of at least 120 on the first run so the sample is not empty in a quiet month.

Scheduling and baseline

1. Run once with firstRunMode: "baseline" to record the current filings without emitting them, or leave emitAll to receive the current set as a first batch.
2. Schedule the actor (daily or weekly). Each run emits only filings it has not reported before under the same monitorId.
3. Use several monitorId values for separate watchlists.

State lives in a key-value store named lobby-monitor-<hash> under key STATE; delete it to reset. The store keeps up to 50,000 seen filing IDs.

Webhook

With webhookUrl set, each run POSTs:

{ "monitorId": "default", "runAt": "...", "since": "2026-06-01", "new_registration": 1, "new_activity_report": 9, "new_fec_filing": 0, "emitted": 10, "filings": [ ...first 50 records... ] }

Point it at Slack, Zapier, Make or your own endpoint.

Pricing

$0.005 per run plus $0.02 per alert emitted. A weekly schedule watching ten clients typically costs well under a dollar a month.