Good news for Washington insiders; not so for the American people.
Some manufacturing firms have been cutting jobs in response to tariffs’ raising their input costs, and the overall economy has been hammered by uncertainty, with a plummeting stock market coinciding with a declining dollar and higher Treasury bond yields. But you can always count on protectionism to be a full-employment program for lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and the Trump administration’s tariff plan is no exception.
An analysis, by Advancing American Freedom, of lobbying disclosures filed with the clerk of the House of Representatives found that lobbying expenditures on trade issues were $4.9 million in the first quarter of 2025. That’s 277 percent higher than the $1.3 million spent in the first quarter of 2024.
The number of registered lobbying entities also soared, from 89 in the first quarter of last year to 212 in the first quarter of this year. That increase isn’t as large, in percentage terms, as the increase in the amount of money spent, which means that the average tariff lobbyist is richer. The average tariff-related lobbying contract is worth on average 21 percent more than it did last year.
The last major surge in tariff-lobbying was in 2018, the year the first Trump administration began its trade wars. Tariff lobbyist spending shot up from $702,500 in the first quarter of 2017 to $2.2 million in the first quarter of 2018, with the number of registered entities rising from 71 to 139. This time around, the trade war is much larger, so the lobbying is much larger to match.
Lobbying is not an unfortunate side effect of protectionism; it is an integral part. A government that has the power to punish businesses also has the power to exempt businesses from punishment, and it pays big for a big business to get an exemption. Spending a million dollars on a team of lobbyists has the potential to secure an exemption that could save a big business hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
Better yet if the lobbying firm is close to the party in power. It’s not a coincidence that one of the firms closest to Trump’s orbit, Ballard Partners, has had three times the quarterly revenue this year as it did in the first quarter of last year. It lobbies on a wide variety of issues, and its clients include JPMorgan Chase, Chevron, and Netflix.
Small businesses, of course, can’t afford lobbyists, so their concerns get pushed aside. The supposedly populist administration that’s looking out for “Main Street” is, with its tariff policy, favoring big businesses that are already close to the government and can afford expensive lobbyists to plead their case.
Tariffs are great for Washington insiders. They’re not so great for the American people, who will pay higher prices and, in some cases, lose their jobs because politicians and bureaucrats decided they knew best how to arrange trade.