Big Tech’s armies of lobbyists deliver victories during first year of Trump’s second term

Big Tech’s armies of lobbyists are helping deliver victories for the industry in Washington. President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House has been defined by its repeated intervention on behalf of dominant technology firms, from picking winners and losers to shielding the industry from competition, accountability, and regulation.

“Big Tech and its lobbyists have taken Washington by storm since Trump was sworn in for his second term,” said Issue One Vice President of Advocacy Alix Fraser. “The Trump administration is packed with tech industry insiders who have acted in the interest of their own companies — not the American people — to rig policy for their own profit.”

Fraser continued: “Tech companies have unleashed pay-to-play politics at a scale rarely seen, running massive deceptive campaigns and deploying armies of lobbyists in order to evade accountability. Through these activities, tech companies have undermined U.S. national security and hindered commonsense protections for kids online at the state and federal levels. Congress must act to protect our children, defend American democracy, and finally hold Big Tech companies accountable for the harms they cause.”

A new Issue One analysis of the latest federal lobbying disclosures shows that eight of the largest tech, artificial intelligence (AI), and social media companies spent a combined $71 million on federal lobbying last year alone — an average of nearly $330,000 per day that Congress was in session.

This total includes spending by:

• Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube
• ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok
• Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram
• Microsoft
• Nvidia, a leading designer of the computer chips powering the current AI boom
• OpenAI, the company behind the AI tool ChatGPT
• Snap, the parent company of SnapChat
• X, formerly known as Twitter

That spending paid off: Congress was sidelined while the White House pushed through policies that locked in industry advantages.

Read Issue One’s full analysis.