Federal Lobbying Disclosure Scraper

Extract lobbying data from the official U.S. Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) database. Access filings, contribution reports, registrant organizations, clients, and individual lobbyists.

What data can you get?

Lobbying Filings (LD-1 / LD-2)

• Registrant and client details
• Income and expenses reported
• Specific lobbying issues and issue areas
• Individual lobbyists and their covered government positions
• Foreign entity involvement and ownership percentages
• Filing dates, types, and periods

Contribution Reports (LD-203)

• Political contributions by lobbyists
• FECA, honorary, meeting, and other contribution types
• Contributor, payee, and honoree names
• Amounts and dates

Registrants, Clients & Lobbyists

• Organization details, addresses, and contact information
• Client-registrant relationships
• Individual lobbyist names and IDs

Use cases

• Investigative journalism: Track who's lobbying for what and how much they're spending
• Policy research: Analyze lobbying trends by industry, issue area, or time period
• Competitive intelligence: See which companies are lobbying on specific issues
• Compliance monitoring: Track foreign entity involvement in lobbying
• Political contribution tracking: Follow the money from lobbyists to campaigns
• Academic research: Study lobbying patterns and influence

API Key (Optional)

An API key increases your rate limit from 15 to 120 requests per minute. Registration is free:

1. Go to https://lda.senate.gov/api/register/
2. Create an account (email, username, password)
3. Your API key appears on your profile page
4. Paste it into the "API Key" field

The scraper works without a key, just slower.

Example inputs

All 2025 filings mentioning "artificial intelligence"

{
    "dataset": "filings",
    "filingYear": 2025,
    "lobbyingIssues": "\"artificial intelligence\""
}

Big spenders: filings over $1M in 2024

{
    "dataset": "filings",
    "filingYear": 2024,
    "amountMin": 1000000,
    "maxResults": 100
}

Lobbying by a specific company

{
    "dataset": "filings",
    "clientName": "\"Google\"",
    "filingYear": 2025
}

Political contributions mid-year 2024

{
    "dataset": "contributions",
    "filingYear": 2024,
    "filingPeriod": "mid_year"
}

All registrants in California

{
    "dataset": "registrants",
    "state": "CA"
}

Output

Each record is a clean JSON object with human-readable field names. Filings include nested lobbying activities with issue areas and lobbyist details.

Pricing

This Actor uses pay-per-event pricing at $5 per 1,000 results.

Data source

All data comes from the U.S. Senate Office of Public Records via their official REST API. Data covers filings from 2000 to present (contributions from 2008).

Limits

• The Senate API returns max 25 results per page, so large datasets require many requests
• With an API key: ~120 pages/min. Without: ~15 pages/min
• Some very old filings may have incomplete data