Lobbying firms have spent more over the past year to get the attention of United States President Donald Trump. Photo / Demetrius Freeman, The Washington Post
For the first time, a firm that once employed Donald Trump’s Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Attorney-General Pam Bondi became the highest-paid lobbying shop in Washington DC so far this year, underscoring an intense demand for inroads into the United States President’s orbit.
Ballard Partners, founded by GOP fundraiser and Trump ally Brian Ballard, more than quadrupled its revenue this year, representing such clients as Harvard University and TikTok.
Lobbying expenditures overall have been up 21% this year compared with the same period in 2024, according to a Washington Post analysis of disclosure reports made public this week.
If the pace continues to year’s end, it would be the largest annual increase since at least 1998, according to OpenSecrets data.
Ballard is among several Republican firms that saw business boom in the third-quarter as corporate America grapples with Trump’s unorthodox style and uncertainty around his trade and healthcare policies. Through a representative, Ballard Partners declined to comment.
It’s common for firms with ties to the party occupying the White House to experience surges in business when the governing party changes and established firms with bipartisan practices also reported strong revenue this year.
However, the six firms that have seen the highest revenue growth mostly have strong ties to Trump.
Miller Strategies, a firm founded in 2017 by Jeff Miller, who served as the finance director for Trump’s inauguration, quadrupled its revenue compared with the same period last year.
Mercury Public Affairs, where Wiles also used to be employed, more than doubled its revenue.
Along with a rise in Maga-tied firms, industry insiders say, is a shift in how the business of lobbying is done.
Much of it is aimed at Trump himself or his top officials, whereas in past administrations lobbyists would rarely have such direct access, according to interviews with industry insiders.
That has been evident in a number of recent White House deals with companies such as chipmakers Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices agreeing to share revenue from their sales to China in exchange for permission to export high-powered chips there - a deal that was viewed as norm-shattering.
This month, British drugmaker AstraZeneca agreed to lower its drug prices as the Administration provided the company with a three-year tariff reprieve - a similar deal to the one it made with Pfizer.
The White House said such deals were meant to serve the interests of Americans.
“The era of special interest groups colluding with Washington, DC, to get a free ride off the backs of the American people ended the day President Trump took office,” White House spokesman Kush Desai wrote in an email.
“The only special interest influencing President Trump’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people.”
With regard to Wiles’ connection to Ballard, “Susie Wiles is an outstanding public servant. Anyone who works with Susie knows that she holds herself to the highest ethical and moral standards,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote in an emailed statement.
“President Trump has selected the most talented group of outsiders, and they have all made great personal sacrifices in pursuit of our historic effort to Make America Great Again.”
Justice Department spokesman Gates McGavick likewise said Bondi “adheres to the highest applicable ethical obligations in all matters and her prior work before taking office has no nexus with her work as Attorney-General.”
Under the new Administration, traditional firms have waning cachet with the White House, which has powered the rise of newer firms, said James Burnham, managing partner at King Street Legal, who earlier this year served as general counsel to the Trump Administration’s US Doge Service.
“Many of the folks in both Trump administrations - but certainly in Trump 47 - are not traditional sort of government people” with ties to established lobbying and law firms, he said in an interview.
“That creates a huge market gap for smaller firms and smaller independent operations” to fill.
Before Trump was first elected in 2016, Ballard Partners had no presence in Washington.
Having founded the firm in Florida in 1998, Ballard in 2017 opened its first office in a lobbying world that experts say was caught off-guard by Trump’s election.
As a Trump donor and fundraiser, Ballard used his access to the President to grow his firm into a powerhouse that earned US$24 million in 2020.
Bondi joined the firm in 2019 and worked there until Trump nominated her to become attorney-general in 2024. Wiles had been with the firm since 2011 and joined Mercury Public Affairs in 2022.
Even during Trump’s first term, Ballard still trailed more established firms such as Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck and Akin Gump.
That changed this year, as companies have flocked to the firm to represent them in a policy environment characterised by its uncertain tariff policies, shifting priorities around healthcare and dilemmas over trade and technology policy with China.
So far, the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok has paid Ballard US$450,000 to lobby the federal Government, including the White House, on issues “related to internet technology, regulation of content platform”, according to disclosures.
As the Trump Administration works to keep the popular video app running in the US, it is working on a proposed deal to have business interests linked to billionaire Republican donors Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle, and Jeff Yass, a co-founder of Susquehanna International Group, to take ownership stakes in a US version of the company, the Post has reported.
And as Harvard negotiates over billions in federal funding that the Trump Administration froze earlier this year, President and Fellows of Harvard College has paid Ballard Partners US$270,000 this year to lobby Congress and the White House on issues concerning “education and educational research”.
Other firms with ties to Trump have also seen a business boom. Miller Strategies was not close to being a top-earning firm by the time Trump left the White House in 2020. But Miller has become the seventh-highest earning firm this year, according to the Post’s analysis.
Last month, pharmaceutical giant Pfizer won a three-year tariff reprieve after it agreed to sell its drugs to the Government at discounted rates. The company retained Miller Strategies in December after Trump won re-election and has since paid Miller US$360,000 to lobby the White House, Commerce Department and other agencies on “Medicare and healthcare policy issues as they relate to drug pricing”. Miller did not respond to a request for comment.
Though firms with strong ties to Trump’s White House have seen the most pronounced gains this year, established institutions continue to attract clients. Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, long a K Street power player, was the second-highest grossing firm this year. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, also a K Street mainstay, was fourth.
Will Moschella, co-chair of the government relations department at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck challenged the idea that firms like his had lost connections to the White House.
“Our numbers speak for themselves,” he said, pointing to the firm’s US$54m in revenue year-to-date, a 6% increase from the same period last year.
“We have a deep bench of people who worked in both Trump 1 and Trump 2,” he said, adding that his firm is “built for lasting success”.
As demand spikes for connections to Trump’s White House, several White House staffers have recently departed to set up their own lobbying and advisory firms - and they say that recent experience translates into knowing how to navigate the Administration.
They’re also explicit about how firms should approach the White House.
“Instead of coming to the White House hat-in-hand and being like, ‘I’d like some things’ - it’s like, no: Come to the White House [saying] ‘I’d like to give you something, I’d give you a win, and here’s the tools that I need to get that,’” said May Mailman, who until August served as deputy assistant to the President and recently started her own consultancy, MPL Strategies.
She said companies need to approach the Administration with any request showing “what’s in it for the US”.
Mailman, 37, says she’ll advise clients on how to navigate the White House but not do direct lobbying for now. As a consultant, she sometimes works alongside more established firms like Ballard. Mailman declined to name any new clients.
Mailman, a Harvard-trained lawyer, said she helped draft executive orders Trump signed during his first week in office this year - such as one declaring there are only two sexes, male and female, which restricted transgender rights in the federal government.
Mailman was also at the centre of early negotiations with Harvard. and she continues to work as a special government employee as the Administration seeks to finalise a deal with Harvard and other universities.
Trent Morse, 34, left the White House in September to start his own lobbying firm.
As deputy assistant to the President and deputy director of presidential personnel, Morse said he’s intimately familiar with the Administration, having helped hire more than 3200 staffers after Trump entered office in January. Morse is still searching for office space to house his firm, Morse-Strategies. He is also serving as a senior strategic adviser with the Brownstein firm.
“We understand the way this Administration thinks,” Morse, 34, said, referring to himself and others who have recently left. “We know 47. We were there. We’ve been in the room before.”
Morse and Mailman are so fresh out of the White House they talk as though they’re still a part of it - yet both are subject to a mandatory cooling-off period in which they cannot directly lobby the White House.
They say they will do their work so that it aligns with the Administration’s objectives. They challenged the wide perception that this White House is more transactional than others.
“It’s ‘We’re open for business.’ It’s not transactional,” Morse said, noting that it’s not Trump that’s benefitting from the deals but the American public.
“And I think that the way this Administration looks at things is like, ‘How can we achieve these America First objectives?’”
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