Current laws regulating lobbying fail to protect the public’s right to know who is working to influence legislation and policy in Washington, D.C. as some 20,000 lobbyists ply the halls of government. Only about half of those 20,000 even bother to register as lobbyists. It is more in a lobbyist’s self-interest to not register as new laws subject lobbyists to campaign finance disclosure and gift rules and reward failures to comply with significant civil and criminal penalties. There are also no records of the Department of Justice ever indicting anyone for failing to register as a lobbyist. (Sunlight Foundation, April 19, 2016, by Libby Watson)
An article by Lee Fang in The Nation, February 19, 2014, documented the rise of shadow lobbying. In 2013 the number of lobbyists had fallen to 12,281, but Fang cites American University professor James Thurber with 30 years studying lobbying as pegging the actual number of lobbyists as close to 100,000. “A loophole-ridden law, poor enforcement, the development of increasingly sophisticated strategies that enlist third-party validators and create faux-grassroots campaigns, along with an Obama administration executive order that gave many in the profession a disincentive to register—all of these forces have combined to produce a near-total collapse of the system that was designed to keep tabs on federal lobbying,” wrote Fang.