How $4.4 Billion in Lobbying Bought a Decade of Pricing Impunity
Public records show the industries that raised prices most aggressively during the pandemic also spent the most money ensuring Congress never acquired the tools to stop them.
The single most documented fact in this investigation is this: U.S. corporate after-tax profit margins peaked at approximately 15.5% of GDP in the third quarter of 2021, the highest level recorded since the 1950s, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis Table 1.14. In that same period, the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City published research finding that corporate profits contributed approximately 53.9% of inflation in the non-financial corporate sector between 2020 and 2022. Those two data points sit in the public record, undisputed. What has never been formally assembled by any federal agency is the full accounting of how the industries generating those margins simultaneously directed capital toward the political processes that might have constrained them. That is what the lobbying disclosure filings, FEC records, and legislative histories, taken together, reveal.
Federal lobbying expenditures, compiled by OpenSecrets from Senate Office of Public Records filings under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, hit $3.73 billion in 2021, climbed to a then-record $4.09 billion in 2022, rose again to $4.24 billion in 2023, and reached a preliminary $4.41 billion in 2024. The top spending sector across 2021 through 2023 combined was pharmaceuticals and health products at $1.48 billion, followed by electronics manufacturing at $812 million, insurance at $612 million, oil and gas at $567 million, and food and beverage at $441 million. These are not anonymous industries. These are the sectors whose margin expansions are documented in the USDA Economic Research Service, the EIA Annual Energy Outlook, and the IQVIA Institute reports. The overlap between who expanded margins most aggressively and who spent most heavily on federal lobbying is not coincidental. It is the central documented pattern of this period.
The pharmaceutical case offers the most granular paper trail. PhRMA, the principal trade association for brand-name drug manufacturers, spent $30.58 million on federal lobbying in 2021, $29.85 million in 2022, and $27.27 million in 2023, totaling $87.7 million across three years, per SOPR LDA quarterly filings. Its member companies spent additionally. Pfizer reported $13.5 million in each of 2021 and 2022 and $12.6 million in 2023. AbbVie, maker of Humira — a drug priced at approximately $6,900 per month in the United States versus approximately $1,300 per month in Germany — spent $9.27 million in 2021, $9.02 million in 2022, and $8.31 million in 2023, per SOPR filings. The Initiative for Medicines, Access and Knowledge documented that AbbVie filed 247 patents related to Humira, extending market exclusivity and enabling those price differentials. The FTC's 2023 report on pay-for-delay settlements documents the mechanism by which biosimilar competition was held off in the U.S. market until January 2023. AbbVie's lobbying against the Inflation Reduction Act's drug negotiation provisions directly corresponded to a period in which those provisions were narrowed, and Humira was placed on the negotiation list only for 2026.
The legislative record of the Inflation Reduction Act, Public Law 117-169, signed August 16, 2022, is instructive in what it omitted as much as what it included. The final law authorized Medicare to negotiate prices for ten drugs in year one, capped insulin costs at $35 per month for Medicare beneficiaries, and imposed an out-of-pocket limit on Medicare Part D. Stripped during negotiations were: government-negotiated drug prices for commercial and private insurance markets, large-scale drug importation provisions, and reference pricing tied to international benchmarks. FEC records show Senator Kyrsten Sinema, then a Democrat from Arizona, received $214,550 from pharmaceutical company PACs and individuals during the 2018 through 2022 cycle, per OpenSecrets' compilation of FEC individual contribution data. Sinema was publicly identified as instrumental in removing the broader negotiation and importation provisions. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, whose negotiations also significantly compressed the legislation from its predecessor Build Back Better Act, received approximately $280,000 from the pharmaceutical industry during the 2017 through 2022 cycle, per OpenSecrets FEC data. Correlation between contributions and legislative outcomes does not establish causation under the law. The documented sequence — dollars in, provisions out — is a matter of public record.
The insulin pricing timeline illustrates the cost of that sequence in concrete terms. Humalin R, manufactured by Eli Lilly, carried a price of approximately $20 per vial in 1996 and approximately $332 per vial in 2019, a roughly 1,500 percent increase over 23 years, according to research published in Clinical Diabetes by Yale and Harvard researchers and confirmed by Brigham and Women's Hospital studies. Estimated manufacturing cost: $2 to $6 per vial. Eli Lilly's lobbying expenditures on insulin-specific legislation are detailed in its LDA quarterly filings from 2019 through 2022. In March 2023, Eli Lilly voluntarily announced a $35 per month cap — after the IRA's Medicare insulin cap had already passed, after sustained congressional pressure, and after sustained negative media coverage. The voluntary announcement came years after the gap between manufacturing cost and list price had been publicly documented. What the public record cannot establish with precision is exactly which specific lobbying contacts or contribution relationships delayed legislative action in the years prior. That gap is itself a product of disclosure law limitations.
The grocery and food manufacturing sector presents a parallel structure. Tyson Foods reported a 48.2 percent year-over-year rise in net income in fiscal year 2021, per its 10-K filing with the SEC via EDGAR. Its CFO Stewart Glendinning described the company as having been 'very effective at price realization' on the company's February 7, 2022 earnings call transcript. Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen stated on the December 2, 2021 earnings call that inflation was 'good for Kroger' in terms of managing margins — a statement subsequently cited by Senator Elizabeth Warren in a January 2022 letter to the company. The Food & Beverage sector as a whole spent $441 million on federal lobbying from 2021 through 2023, per SOPR LDA filings compiled by OpenSecrets. The FTC's 2024 grocery market study, the most recent comprehensive federal effort in this sector, is sector-specific and does not cross-reference lobbying expenditures with regulatory outcomes in the manner that a full investigative record would require.
What remains hidden is significant and quantifiable in terms of what instruments would reveal it. First, dark money flows — 501(c)(4) and 501(c)(6) organizations that spent on issue advertising and electoral activity benefiting lawmakers in positions to shape pricing legislation — are not fully disclosed under current law. A mandatory disclosure requirement for electioneering communications expenditures by trade associations and social welfare organizations would close that gap. Second, no federal agency has formally compiled or subpoenaed the corpus of earnings call transcripts in which executives described pricing strategy during 2021 through 2023. The FTC has authority under Section 6(b) of the FTC Act to compel such production across an industry. It has used that authority for the grocery sector. It has not used it comprehensively across all consumer-facing industries in which margin expansion and lobbying expenditure overlapped. Third, the full accounting of revolving-door movements — former congressional staff and agency officials who moved into lobbying roles for the sectors they previously regulated — exists in scattered LDA filings but has never been assembled into a single public database with time-lag analysis. The Office of Government Ethics holds some of this data. The rest is in LDA registrant disclosures. The instrument that would reveal the complete picture is a combined OGE-LDA cross-referenced database, searchable by the public, updated quarterly. Congress has never mandated its creation.