Lobbying firms allied with President Trump saw a bonanza in revenue last year, as many of their highest-paying clients signed up after Trump’s 2024 win to influence the new administration. Six firms led by Trump fundraisers or former staffers—Ballard Partners, Miller Strategies, Continental Strategies, CGCN Group, Checkmate Government Relations, and law firm Michael, Best & Friedrich—raked in $145 million from new lobbying clients in 2025, according to a Sludge analysis of lobbying data.
The tumult of the Trump administration led to record-breaking lobbying spending overall in D.C., and made the deeply Trump-tied Ballard Partners the highest-earning shop in town. Led by top Trump campaign fundraiser Brian Ballard, the public affairs firm set a new record with over $88.1 million in lobbying revenue. It was a nearly fourfold increase for the influence shop, former employer of Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, over the year before. Ballard Partners signed more than 200 new federal lobbying clients in 2025, who together paid the firm roughly $55.6 million, according to Sludge’s review of data compiled by OpenSecrets.
Most of Ballard Partners’ highest-spending lobbying clients were foreign companies or had significant foreign interests seeking to draw on the firm’s access to the Trump administration, as Sludge examined recently. Another high-spending client that hired the firm last year was global law firm Kirkland & Ellis, which cut a deal with the Trump administration to duck punishment, issued in executive orders, over work for the president’s perceived enemies. They paid Ballard Partners $820,000 for lobbying on “employment practices.”
Palantir, the MAGA-aligned software and analytics company, hired Ballard Partners in January 2025 to lobby on “Government software modernization issues.” Palantir’s government revenue under Trump has soared by hundreds of millions of dollars through projects with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), and others. The company’s CEO Alex Karp donated $1 million to both Trump’s inauguration and super PAC MAGA Inc. after the election. In August, Palantir was awarded an Army contract worth up to $10 billion over the next decade, bundling dozens of agreements into a more streamlined package.
More new Ballard clients have been bolstered by Trump administration actions. Cryptocurrency company Ripple Labs, which hired the firm a week after the 2024 election, had its token XRP included in Trump’s U.S. Crypto Reserve, a move that analysts predicted would spur institutional investment in crypto. On Jan. 2, the company donated $5 million worth of the token to the Trump Vance inauguration committee. Chevron, which hired the firm weeks after Trump’s win, is a prominent member of lobbying group the American Petroleum Institute (API), which laid out a plan for the incoming administration to boost extraction and exports of fossil energy. The oil industry received mammoth policy wins in the multi-trillion-dollar Republican reconciliation budget that Trump signed into law last summer.
Miller Strategies, founded by another top Trump fundraiser, Jeff Miller, saw its lobbying revenue triple over the previous year. The firm signed over 100 new clients in 2025 that paid it more than $27.3 million for lobbying, Sludge found. Zoom Communications hired Miller Strategies in February 2025 and became a top client, spending $800,000 to lobby the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and others on issues including video conferencing. SoftBank, which hired the firm on Jan. 1 of last year, spent $720,000 lobbying with Miller Strategies on AI, technology, and energy issues. Palantir, which hired the firm a month after Trump’s win, spent $690,000 lobbying on defense policy and appropriations. Other new clients of Miller Strategies include supplement company Botanicals for Better Health & Wellness, utilities group Edison Electric Institute, semiconductor manufacturer Micron, and OpenAI, each of which spent $600,000 lobbying with the firm last year. Last month, Miller hosted a pair of Republican fundraisers in Washington expected to raise $20 million for the GOP efforts to hold Congress.
Nearly all of the top lobbying spenders last year with Continental Strategies, founded in 2022 by Trump adviser and fundraiser Carlos Trujillo, were new clients at the firm, leading to an overall 15x rise in revenue over the year before. The firm similarly inked over 100 new lobbying clients that paid it $21 million last year, according to Sludge’s review. Prison contractor GEO Group tapped the firm shortly after Trump’s win, and spent $600,000 lobbying last year as it is poised to profit from the Trump administration’s billions of dollars in funding for detention. Alphabet’s Google Cloud hired the firm of Trump’s former Ambassador Trujillo and spent $480,000 lobbying on “AI innovation.” Healthcare company Centene signed up after Trump’s win and spent $420,000 lobbying on strategic guidance for Medicare, Medicaid, and the health insurance market. Other high-spending new clients of Continental include workforce lodging company Target Hospitality, Panamanian financial services company Atlantida Global Services, and hospital association Florida Essential Healthcare Partnerships.
CGCN Group, home to several Trump administration alumni including Ja’Ron Smith and Tim Pataki, both senior partners, nearly doubled its revenue in 2025 over the previous year. With Trump back in the White House, it signed more than 40 new lobbying clients last year that together paid the firm nearly $8.2 million, Sludge found. Some new clients that were behind millions of dollars in 2025 lobbying revenue: beer, wine, and liquor company Constellation Brands; FanDuel Group; waste company Reworld Waste; defense contractor Leidos; and manufacturer Honeywell International.
Checkmate Government Relations, a firm founded by Ches McDowell, a hunting buddy of Donald Trump Jr., only registered its first federal lobbying client two days after Trump’s 2024 election. McDowell’s outfit gained some 85 clients in 2025 and topped $22.2 million in lobbying revenue. The North Carolina-based firm lobbied for crypto company Binance in securing a pardon for founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, as well as for drugmakers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, and investment firm Monte Valley Energy, which seeks to buy the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia. As Sludge previously reported, Checkmate hired as a lobbyist Chris LaCivita Jr., the son of a Trump campaign co-manager, and hired as an adviser Jackson Hines, nephew of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Michael, Best & Friedrich LLP more than tripled its overall lobbying revenue year-over-year. The firm is home to former Trump White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who remains a top-tier Republican fundraiser, and whose dual titles there are president and chairman of the Board of Advisors. The law firm signed more than 60 new lobbying clients in 2025, bringing in $11 million in revenue from them, Sludge calculated. Some new clients included DraftKings, private equity giant KKR & Co., Norfolk Southern, and Northwell Health, who combined for over a million dollars with the firm. Priebus, who chaired the GOP’s 2024 convention fundraising committee, was formerly the chair of the Republican National Committee from January 2011 to January 2017.
Top Spenders Break Records
K Street fixtures like Brownstein Hyatt, Akin Gump, Holland & Knight, and Cornerstone also reported record high lobbying revenue in Trump’s return to the White House. Fueling the boom, some of Washington D.C.’s top spenders on government influence hit record highs in 2025.
Drugmakers’ giant PhRMA easily set a new record with $38.2 million in lobbying spending last year, according to disclosures tallied by OpenSecrets, including some through Miller Strategies. As the pharma industry battled some Trump administration policies like a public push for “most-favored nation” pricing, it also won a major handout by expanding “orphan drug” exemptions from price negotiations under Medicare. Nine of 13 major U.S. drugmakers hit new lobbying highs, according to Politico, including Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Bristol-Myers Squibb.
Meta spent a record-high $26.3 million on lobbying last year, weighing in with federal agencies on issues from internet privacy to energy as it faced a major antitrust trial at the Federal Trade Commission. Meta’s lobbying blitz, an 8% increase of the year before, led what the reform group Issue One tallied as record-high lobbying spending by Big Tech companies in 2025.
Lockheed Martin, the largest defense contractor in the world, spent nearly $15.7 million lobbying last year, its highest total since 2008. The Trump administration pushed annual defense spending above $1 trillion last year, including through $150 billion in additional spending enacted in Trump’s megabill. Last year, Lockheed and Boeing told media at the Paris Air Show that they were poised to provide parts of Trump’s proposed “Golden Dome” missile shield, whose total costs could reach into the trillions of dollars.
General Dynamics, another of the “Big Five” defense contractors that rake in nearly a third of Pentagon spending, spent $13.7 million lobbying last year, also a new high for the company. In December, General Dynamics was among a long list of companies awarded spots on a new Scalable Homeland Innovative Enterprise Layered Defense (SHIELD) contract vehicle for the Golden Dome system, which has potential to pay out $151 billion over a decade.
UnitedHealth Group, the largest U.S. insurer, hit a new federal lobbying high with $12.5 million spent in 2025, according to disclosures, lobbying Congress and the Centers For Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) on a host of healthcare issues like Medicare Advantage. Giant insurers like UnitedHealth have been accused for years, by state officials and in legal cases, of inflating diagnoses to receive more in Medicare payments, a process known as “upcoding.” Last year, a criminal healthcare-fraud unit of the Department of Justice questioned former employees of UnitedHealth on their Medicare billing practices. Months earlier, a report by an independent congressional agency, known as MedPAC, found that Medicare paid private plans roughly 20% more per enrollee in 2025 than it would cost to cover the same individuals in traditional Medicare—amounting to around $84 billion in excess payments last year alone.
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