🏛️ LDA Lobbying Disclosure Scraper — Federal Lobbying Filings

Pull every quarterly Lobbying Disclosure Act filing — direct from the Senate's official LDA database. No paywall, no scraping the front-end, no API key needed.

Under the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA), every registered lobbyist must file quarterly reports identifying their clients, the issues they lobbied on, the specific lobbyists who did the work, the government entities they contacted, and the income earned (or expenses incurred). This Actor wraps lda.senate.gov/api/v1/filings/ and ships clean rows for journalists, corporate-affairs teams, advocacy groups, and compliance officers.

An OpenSecrets / LobbyView data feed — same source as the OpenSecrets website, structured for your stack.

What you get (per filing)

• filing_uuid, filing_type, filing_year, filing_period_display
• registrant_name, registrant_id, registrant_description, registrant_address
• client_name, client_id, client_general_description, client_state, client_country
• income, expenses, expenses_method — USD reported by the lobbyist
• lobbying_activities[] — array, each with:
  • general_issue_code + _display (e.g. TAX, HCR, DEF)
  • description — the specific lobbying activity narrative
  • lobbyists[] — first/last name, covered position, "new" flag
  • government_entities[] — House, Senate, exec branch agencies contacted
• issue_codes[] — flat list of codes touched by the filing
• lobbyist_names[] — flat list of named lobbyists across all activities
• government_entities[] — flat list of agencies contacted
• foreign_entities[] — when applicable
• filing_document_url, filing_url, dt_posted

Six high-leverage use cases

1. Reporter beat: "what is X lobbying on?" — set clientName: "BlackRock" and pull every LDA filing on behalf of any BlackRock entity, with full issue narratives.
2. Competitive intel: track competitor lobbying — corporate-affairs at Pharma A want to see every Pharma B filing on biosimilar policy.
3. Advocacy group monitoring — set issueArea: "TAX" to monitor every K-Street tax-policy filing this quarter.
4. Compliance: my registrant filed? — set registrantName to your firm and confirm filings are posted with correct amounts before the deadline.
5. Academic research — pull the full historical corpus (records go back to 2008) for econometric analysis of lobbying ROI.
6. Government-affairs SaaS — embed this dataset to enrich your CRM with named lobbyists and the specific government entities they touch.

JSON quick start

{
  "filingYear": 2024,
  "filingPeriod": "first_quarter",
  "clientName": "Amazon",
  "maxFilings": 25
}

POST to https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nexgendata~lda-lobbying-disclosure-scraper/runs?token=YOUR_TOKEN.

Python SDK example

from apify_client import ApifyClient

client = ApifyClient("YOUR_TOKEN")
run = client.actor("nexgendata/lda-lobbying-disclosure-scraper").call(
    run_input={
        "filingYear": 2024,
        "filingPeriod": "first_quarter",
        "issueArea": "TAX",
        "maxFilings": 100,
    }
)
total_income = sum(
    float(item["income"] or 0)
    for item in client.dataset(run["defaultDatasetId"]).iterate_items()
)
print(f"Total reported income on TAX-issue filings: ${total_income:,.0f}")

cURL one-liner

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/nexgendata~lda-lobbying-disclosure-scraper/runs?token=$APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "content-type: application/json" \
  -d '{"filingYear":2024,"filingPeriod":"first_quarter","clientName":"Amazon","maxFilings":25}'

Pipe the output anywhere

• Zapier — Apify → New Items in Dataset → Slack. Daily LDA digest in seconds.
• Make.com — Apify trigger → Airtable / Google Sheets / Notion
• n8n — Apify run → enrichment → CRM update
• DBT / Snowflake / BigQuery — quarterly pull → fct_lobbying_filings table

Pricing — pay only for what you get

Event	Cost
Actor start	$0.00005 (one-time per run, scaled by GB-RAM)
Each LDA filing	$0.10

A quarterly pull of every filing for a single client (~10 filings) is ~$1. The complete Q1 2024 universe (~25,000 filings) is ~$2,500. Compare to LobbyView Pro ($5K+/yr), Bloomberg Government ($10K+/yr), or Quorum ($24K+/yr starting price).

Cost calculator: filings × $0.10 + $0.00005 × memoryGB. No subscription, no minimum.

FAQ

Q. Why are some income values null? A. Lobbyists report EITHER income (LD-2) OR expenses (LD-2 method B), not both. The schema preserves the null on the side that doesn't apply.

Q. What's the difference between a registrant and a client? A. Registrant = the lobbying firm or in-house lobbying entity that's federally registered. Client = the entity paying the registrant to lobby on their behalf. A K-Street firm registered as BROWNSTEIN HYATT FARBER SCHRECK may have hundreds of clients in one quarter.

Q. Can I get the lobbyists' covered government positions? A. Yes — lobbying_activities[].lobbyists[].covered_position is populated when the lobbyist previously held a covered government role (e.g. Senate staff). This is the "revolving door" signal.

Q. What about LD-203 contribution reports? A. Use filingPeriod: "mid_year" or "year_end" to pull LD-203 filings (semi-annual political-contribution reports).

Q. Are foreign-government clients included? A. Yes — when applicable, foreign_entities[] is populated. For full FARA disclosures (registered foreign agents), use the DOJ's separate FARA database.

Related actors from the same author

• FEC Independent Expenditures Scraper — campaign-finance Schedule E filings, $0.008/expenditure.
• USAspending Federal Awards Scraper — federal contracts/grants, $0.08/award. Companion follow-the-money dataset.
• Government Contracts Search — SAM.gov contract-opportunity feed for GovTech sales.

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Built and maintained by the nexgendata team. Bug reports & feature requests welcome via Apify Console messaging.