When Foreign Governments Hire American PR: The FARA Map

In early 2015, the People's Republic of China retained Rogich Communications Group — a Las Vegas–based firm founded by longtime Republican political operative Sig Rogich — for U.S. public affairs and government relations work. The engagement, disclosed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), was unusual at the time mainly for who chose whom: a Nevada firm, an unconventional partner, an enormous client.

A decade later, the engagement is unremarkable in pattern and entirely typical in form. Foreign governments — including ones the United States has, in the same period, designated as adversaries — retain American public relations and lobbying firms by the dozen. The disclosures are public. The mechanics are stable. The communications work is more consequential than at any prior moment.

This is the map of how foreign governments hire American PR.

The Legal Frame

The Foreign Agents Registration Act, passed in 1938 and meaningfully strengthened only twice since, requires anyone acting in the United States as an agent of a foreign principal — government, political party, or individual — to register with the Department of Justice, disclose the engagement and compensation, and label the public communications produced on the principal's behalf.

The statute has been on the books for nearly ninety years. Enforcement has been episodic. The 2017 prosecution of Paul Manafort for unregistered work on behalf of the Yanukovych government of Ukraine sharply increased DOJ attention to FARA, and the unit responsible for FARA enforcement has expanded its activity every year since.

The Repeat Players

Foreign government work in the United States is concentrated in a relatively small group of firms — most of them well-known, most of them disclosed quarterly in FARA filings.

• BLJ Worldwide, Mercury Public Affairs, Hill+Knowlton Strategies, BCW Global, Edelman, APCO Worldwide, Brunswick Group, FGS Global, Qorvis Communications, The Podesta Group (before its 2017 dissolution), Sard Verbinnen & Co, and a long list of D.C.-based public affairs boutiques.
• Specialist firms with deep regional expertise — Persian Gulf, Sub-Saharan Africa, post-Soviet states, Southeast Asia — that retain longstanding relationships with specific governments across multiple political eras.
• Law firms with FARA-registered public affairs arms — DLA Piper, Akin Gump, Squire Patton Boggs, Holland & Knight, King & Spalding, and others.

The Largest Clients by Disclosed Spending

Across FARA filings over the last decade, the foreign governments most active in U.S. public affairs have included:

• Saudi Arabia — by some measures the largest single foreign-principal source of FARA spending. Multiple firms retained continuously across multiple administrations.
• United Arab Emirates — sustained, multi-firm engagement focused on policy positioning, security cooperation, and economic development.
• Qatar — particularly active during the 2017–2021 regional dispute with Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
• People's Republic of China — engaged across multiple firms with rotating mandates, complicated meaningfully by the post-2017 strategic competition framework and by federal scrutiny of Chinese government communications activity inside the United States.
• Japan, South Korea, Taiwan — large, stable, multi-firm engagements typically focused on alliance management and trade.
• Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Morocco, Azerbaijan — regular FARA filers across multiple firms.
• Russia — sharply reduced after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine; some U.S. firms terminated Russian government engagements within days of the invasion.

What the Work Actually Is

FARA filings describe the work, sometimes specifically. The common categories:

1. Congressional engagement. Briefings, member visits, staff outreach, hearing preparation, coalition-building inside the Capitol.
2. Executive-branch engagement. Meetings, position papers, regulatory comments, agency relationship-building.
3. Media relations. Op-ed placement, journalist briefings, reactive media responses, third-party validator coordination.
4. Crisis response. When a foreign government's domestic actions create U.S. media exposure — a journalist killed, a dissident detained, a regional conflict escalated — the retained firm handles the U.S. press response.
5. Investment and trade positioning. When a foreign sovereign wealth fund makes a major U.S. investment, or a foreign government's state-owned enterprise enters a U.S. market, the FARA-registered firm typically runs the communications.

The Reputational Cost

FARA work has become reputationally hot in a way it was not a decade ago. The Manafort prosecution, the Saudi response to the killing of Jamal Khashoggi in 2018, the post-2022 Russian sanctions regime, and sustained press attention from outlets including The New York Times, ProPublica, and OpenSecrets have all converted what was once routine business into reputationally costly engagement. Several major firms now publicly maintain client-screening committees that decline categories of foreign-government work the firm would have accepted twenty years ago.

Firms that continue the work fall into roughly three groups: D.C. specialists for whom the work is a primary revenue stream and is defended as legitimate political representation under the First Amendment; large global firms that accept the work selectively while declining the most reputationally exposed engagements; and boutique operators who pick up the engagements the larger firms have declined.

The AI-Era Layer

The same retrieval shift reshaping every communications discipline applies to foreign-government PR with particular force. When a journalist, an investor, a researcher, or a regulator asks ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Perplexity about a foreign government's record — its actions, its allies, its U.S. footprint, its lobbyists — the engines synthesize across FARA filings, press coverage, NGO reports, academic work, and government statements. The synthesized answer is increasingly authoritative.

That means two things. First, the disclosure footprint of a foreign-principal engagement — the FARA filing itself, the public registration, the disclosed compensation — is now permanent and easily retrieved. Second, the underlying record of the foreign principal is permanent and easily retrieved. The communications work cannot outrun either.

The discipline is no longer narrative management. It is the management of a permanent, machine-indexed reputational record that compounds across every engagement the firm and the principal undertake.

For more on lobbying, public affairs, and government relations, see Everything-PR's coverage of Public Affairs & Government.