Politics

How To Spend $117M A Month

May 11, 1999 / 11:59 AM EDT / AP

Demonstrating that special interest lobbying follows the hot issues, a report shows that the biggest spenders in trying to influence federal officials are the health care, financial, insurance, and high-tech industries.

Special interests averaged $117 million a month in lobbying expenses during the last half of 1998, according to the report by Public Disclosure Inc., an Internet consulting firm. The figure compared with $100 million a month in lobbying expenditures in the first half of 1997, company co-founder Kent Cooper said.

Old-line sectors such as agriculture, manufacturing, defense contractors, and real estate were far behind in total lobbying expenditures, the report said.

The modern-day giants of Internet technology and telecommunications; the banking, insurance and securities firms that are becoming financial "supermarkets"; and health-care companies with managed-care issues are among the interests now leading the lobbying pack.

"The lobbying expenditures reflect where the growth of the economy is right now," Cooper said. "A lot of the rust-area manufacturing is not as big a factor as it used to be. This reflects that."

The report calculated the cost of special interest lobbying at $702.8 million for the last half of 1998. Communications and technology firms spent $94.3 million; followed by the finance-insurance sectors, with $91.8 million; and health-care firms, with $87.5 million.

The next highest spenders were energy and natural resources, the retail and services industries, transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, defense, real estate and construction and organized labor.

Among issues linked to lobbying expenses that Congress has or will consider are regulation of the Internet; mergers; services that banks, insurers and securities firms can provide; managed care; personal savings accounts; telecommunications; and world trade.

The lobbying "exposes who the players are, who the big ones are," Cooper said. "For the lobbying community it will be startling, because the report will show who else their client ... hired."

Long-distance and local telephone companies led the spending in the communications field, followed by computer and electronics manufacturers, cable television firms and technology companies. In the financial and insurance fields, insurance companies, banks and financial firms and investment advisers were top spenders.

In the health-care sector, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, health care systems, physicians, health maintenance organizations and medical plans were the top spenders, the report said.

Some of the big-name companies and their trade associations that doled out large amounts of lobbying money: Sprint, AT&T, all the major regional phone companies, insurance groups such as American International, and pharmaceutical firms including Pfizer. Trade groups with significant lobbying expenses included he Health Insurance Industry of America, the American Council of Life Insurance, and the American Hospital Association.