# Lobbying Disclosure Act The **Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 (LDA)** is the principal federal statute governing domestic lobbying. It requires individuals and firms that meet income and activity thresholds to register with the Clerk of the House and the Secretary of the Senate and to file periodic reports disclosing their clients, the issues they work on, the chambers and agencies they contact, and the income or expenditures involved. It replaced the largely toothless Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act of 1946, whose vague language and lack of enforcement had rendered it nearly meaningless. ## What it requires, and the 2007 strengthening Under the LDA, a "lobbyist" is someone who makes more than one "lobbying contact" and spends at least 20 percent of their time on lobbying activities for a client over a quarter, where the client meets minimum spending thresholds. The **Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007** — passed after the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal — significantly strengthened the regime: it moved filing to a quarterly electronic system, added separate reporting of campaign contributions and "bundling," imposed gift and travel restrictions, and lengthened the "revolving door" cooling-off periods for former members and staff before they may lobby. ## The structural limitation The LDA's defining weakness is that it discloses money without limiting it — and discloses only a portion of it. Two design features let enormous amounts of influence work go unreported. First, the 20-percent time threshold and the "lobbying contact" definition allow well-compensated influence professionals to avoid registration entirely by styling their work as "strategic advice," "government relations," or "grassroots consulting" rather than direct contact — the phenomenon of "shadow lobbying." Second, the Act covers domestic lobbying only; representation of foreign governments and parties falls under the separate, and differently enforced, [[FARA]] regime. Enforcement of the LDA, handled by the U.S. Attorney for D.C., has historically been minimal. ## Significance for the knowledge base The LDA governs the visible, reportable layer of the influence industry, and its quarterly filings are the primary data backbone for tracking the firms, lobbyists, and client relationships indexed at the [[Lobbying Hub]]. But because so much influence activity is structured to fall outside its definitions, the gap between *registered* lobbying spending and *actual* influence spending is itself one of the central facts the KB documents about how power operates in Washington. The disclosure data is indispensable and systematically incomplete at the same time. ## See Also - [[Lobbying]] — the activity it regulates - [[FARA]] — the parallel regime for foreign principals - [[Campaign Finance]] — the adjacent money-in-politics system - [[Lobbying Hub]] — the vault's K Street hub