The rise of shadow lobbying and its influence on decades of US policy

On today’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking about money and politics — always a good time — and how they come together in the form of lobbying in America. It’s hard to imagine a time when the influence of big corporations and mouthy billionaires didn’t touch every part of American politics, but the kind of lobbying we have now didn’t really exist before the 1970s.

That’s when big corporations started reacting to a cratering economy and did what they do best: throw money around. Now, of course, our political debates about everything from energy and finance to healthcare are deeply intertwined with corporations and their money — and new big players in tech have started spending tons of political money of their own.

To understand the structure of today’s political lobbying and how we got here, I asked Pulitzer Prize winner Brody Mullins on the show. Brody has a new book he co-wrote with his brother Luke Mullins called The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government, which came out last month. It’s a definitive history of modern lobbying in America, told through the lens of some of the industry’s most unsavory characters and the influence they’ve exerted on DC politics across decades. 

Brody and I talked a lot about how lobbying has shifted over the years — from the regulated version on K Street, a real place in DC in proximity of Capitol Hill, to a much more diffuse and hard-to-track form of influence you might call shadow lobbying, in which companies spend tons of money on groups with innocent-sounding names that buy ads and coverage around the country to influence local elections. That avoids disclosure requirements and, in some cases, provides cover for criminal acts. 

Over the last nearly five decades, the power of corporate America on the political landscape has been immeasurable, Brody says. There have been some checks on this growing power, like post-Waterform reforms and campaign finance laws, but this melding of money and politics has been a runaway train well into the 21st century, when big tech started to become a major player in the political lobbying scene. 

Now, tech companies have more money and more direct influence over their customers than virtually any bank, pharmaceutical company, or oil and gas company you can think of, and they’ve started deploying new lobbying tactics, like in-app prompts, to pressure politicians and thwart regulation. Sometimes it works; you’ll hear Brody and I talk about the famous internet “Blackout” protest of 2012 that brought down laws called SOPA and PIPA. But in some cases, as we saw with TikTok recently, it can backfire. 

As you’ll hear Brody explain, this isn’t entirely set in stone. The rise of Donald Trump and his decidedly untraditional approach to influence peddling tactics really turned lobbying on its head in 2016. With another election coming up, the shape of lobbying in America could change yet again and produce the single most effective and powerful lobbyist in American history.