Let's say I'm Boeing and I pay a lobbying firm 15M USD - what happens next? Where does the money go?
The team of in-house and outside lobbyists do a number of things including monitoring legislation, writing internal position papers laying out the company’s arguments for and against legislation, briefing execs on changing rules, organizing visits from execs, and participating in strategy sessions with trade associations.
Most importantly they try to exert influence. The most direct way is through meeting with congressional staff and regulators. These meetings are fairly easy to come by — anyone can call a Congressional office and request a meeting on an issue(and more citizens should!), but in most instances you will get shunted to a low level staffer who politely listens to your plea and takes notes. But, in the case of Big Business, that $3 million you spend in consultants brings with it some very deep rolodexes. They can get meetings with Chiefs of Staff, Chief Counsels, and sometimes directly with members of Congress so you can go to a Senate office and have a deep discussion about a specific piece of legislation. You can articulate how the legislation will impact your business, the economy at large, or the Senator’s constituents. You can propose new legislative language. Your team of lawyers can show the underpaid, overworked staffer all the loopholes he’s unknowingly introducing. You can propose a “carve out” to protect some special group (e.g. “Companies that spend $X in R&D should be exempt from provision Y”).
There are many other ways in which lobbyists try to get the ear of Congress, but the above encapsulates a significant portion of the spend you see in lobbying disclosure reports.
> They can get meetings with Chiefs of Staff, Chief Counsels, and sometimes directly with members of Congress so you can go to a Senate office
But how? Is it simply that the lobbyists make plain who they are representing and the government people involved know a lot of tax dollars are potentially at stake, or is it something more skullduggerous?
$15M is a lot of money, so Boeing obviously feels it's worth it; maybe I'm being too cynical, but I just can't see how unless there is something underhand afoot.
https://statescoop.com/nationwide-lobbying-push-for-contract...
Lobbying is very similar to legal work, and often is done by lawyers. Highly trained professionals take often very complicated domain issues and distill them into terms politicians and their staff can understand. (Typically, the politician, as a matter of ideology, already supports the position the company is espousing. The purpose of the lobbying then is to arm the politician with data and legal arguments to support that position and counter the data and arguments offered by the opposition.) Producing a single document can cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You might pay them $1M to do research on a particular policy that is beneficial/detrimental to your business. That same firm will then put together a polish presentation or proposed language for legislation and get it in front of politicians where it makes a difference.
It's certainly not "Google hired this firm for $1M and they have $900K in donations to a politicians election fund". That's illegal.
A good example (that another poster mentioned) are organizations like the ACLU. They raise money and use it to lobby the government to get pro-ACLU laws written.
They may also start a PR campaign for your case.
At best, lobbying is bribery with a facade of conversation. At worst it's extortion. The corruption is baked in either way.