ConocoPhillips Spent $19M Lobbying for Willow. Biden Approved It.
Public records trace a straight line from oil industry lobbying dollars and bipartisan congressional pressure to the Biden administration's approval of an $8 billion Arctic drilling project it...
The single most documented fact in this investigation is also the most inconvenient for both political parties: ConocoPhillips spent $19.35 million on federal lobbying between 2021 and 2024, with the Willow Project as its primary domestic target, and in March 2023, the Biden administration approved that project on federal Arctic land — reversing a core campaign commitment. That sequence does not prove causation. The money trail, however, is public record, and the public deserves to follow it.
The numbers are drawn directly from Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings. ConocoPhillips registered $5.1 million in lobbying expenditures in 2021, $5.42 million in 2022, $6.78 million in 2023, and $7.23 million in 2024, with Willow Project permitting listed explicitly as a target issue in each year's LD-2 quarterly filings. The company employs a network of in-house and external lobbyists who worked FERC, Interior, and congressional offices simultaneously. These are not allegations — they are the company's own disclosures to the United States Senate.
On the congressional side, the pressure campaign had bipartisan architecture, which matters for understanding why it succeeded. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), ranking member of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, received $95,400 from oil and gas industry sources in the 2022 cycle, according to OpenSecrets.org aggregation of FEC filings. Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) received $312,500 from the same sector in that cycle. Both senators held multiple documented meetings with Interior Secretary Deb Haaland in January and February 2023, per Interior Department calendar records partially released under FOIA. Their pressure was expected and structurally rational given their constituencies and committee assignments. What was less expected was the Democratic cover.
Rep. Mary Peltola (D-AK), the first Alaska Native elected to Congress, received $48,200 from oil and gas sources in her 2022 campaign cycle per FEC filings, and she publicly and vocally supported Willow Project approval. Political analysts at the time — and the record since — suggest her support gave the Biden White House bipartisan insulation for a decision that contradicted the administration's stated climate commitments. Whether her position was driven by constituency interest, financial relationships, or both, the records show only the contribution figures and her public advocacy. Voters may weigh those facts as they choose.
The broader lobbying ecosystem in which Willow sits is staggering in scale. Oil and gas companies and their trade associations spent an estimated $124.4 million on federal lobbying in 2022, $139.7 million in 2023, and approximately $147 million in 2024, according to Senate Office of Public Records disclosures aggregated by OpenSecrets.org. The American Petroleum Institute alone — whose members include ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and eight other major producers — spent $8.75 million, $9.42 million, and $10.18 million in those same three years on registered federal lobbying. Academic research cited by the Center for Responsive Politics, including Lee Drutman's Oxford University Press study 'The Business of America is Lobbying,' estimates that trade association political expenditure including state lobbying, advertising, and think tank funding may run two to four times disclosed figures. The true number is structurally unknowable under current disclosure law.
This story is not simply about one party serving one industry. The renewable energy sector, led by NextEra Energy — the nation's largest wind and solar operator — spent $18.34 million in 2022, $21.67 million in 2023, and $22.89 million in 2024 on federal lobbying, per its own LD-2 disclosures, making it one of the highest-spending energy lobbyists in Washington. NextEra CEO Jim Robo held documented meetings with senior White House officials during development of the Inflation Reduction Act, per White House visitor logs obtained through FOIA and reported by Axios in August 2022. The IRA's clean energy investment tax credit provisions are estimated to have generated $4 to $6 billion in tax credit value for NextEra's renewable subsidiary. The pipeline from lobbying investment to policy benefit runs in both directions along the ideological spectrum.
Perhaps the most explicit documented instance of industry-to-policy communication in recent history involves the coal sector: Murray Energy CEO Bob Murray delivered a detailed written 'action plan' to then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry in April 2017 requesting specific regulatory rollbacks — including Paris Agreement withdrawal, Clean Power Plan repeal, and named personnel appointments to DOE and FERC. That document was obtained and published by The Guardian in August 2017. DOE confirmed receipt. Multiple requested actions subsequently occurred. Murray Energy also contributed more than $300,000 to the Trump inaugural committee and $1 million to the America First Policies super PAC, per FEC and IRS filings. The report's gap flag is honest: the degree to which those financial relationships shaped the regulatory response remains, in the record available, unproven as direct causation. But the document exists, the money is filed, and the outcomes are law.
What remains hidden matters as much as what is known. Interior Secretary Haaland's internal deliberative communications on the Willow Project were partially withheld in FOIA responses to environmental groups under deliberative process exemptions — standard legal practice that nonetheless leaves the actual decision-making rationale unconfirmed by primary source. The American Petroleum Institute does not disclose member dues or the proportion allocated to lobbying versus advertising versus research, meaning the $9 to $10 million in annual LDA disclosures represents an unknown fraction of total political expenditure. ExxonMobil's $59.5 billion acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources was cleared by the FTC with the unusual condition that Pioneer's CEO be barred from Exxon's board over alleged OPEC production coordination; the full FTC investigative record has not been publicly released. The instrument that would most illuminate these gaps is a combination of three things: mandatory disclosure of trade association lobbying expenditures including dues allocations, release of the full FTC Pioneer-OPEC investigation file, and full release of Interior Department deliberative communications on Willow under a congressional subpoena rather than FOIA — which carries no exemption for legislative oversight when properly exercised. Until those records are public, what is documented is sufficient to demand the question. What is hidden is sufficient to demand the answer.