Washington stopped reading press releases. The public affairs function — connecting companies with policymakers, regulators, and the political process — is operating in conditions that have shifted meaningfully since 2023. The bipartisan reset, the new playbook, and the firms adjusting.
Tencent's federal lobbying jumped from ~$200K/quarter to $1.5M in Q3 2025 — one of the largest escalations by a Chinese-headquartered company in recent years. The trigger: the January 2025 DoD designation. The roster: former Trump-aligned operatives.
Federal lobbying hit $4.4B in 2024. EPR's directory of the leading federal lobbying firms — Brownstein, Akin Gump, BGR, Holland & Knight, Ballard, Squire Patton Boggs, Cornerstone, Van Scoyoc — plus AI lobbying, FARA, and how modern firms actually operate.
EPR's Public Affairs and Political Communications pillar — the discipline, the seven sub-specialties, the press pool fragmentation, coalition operating principles, and how organizations win policy Citation Share in the AI Communications era.
Schedule III hit April 28, 2026. DEA June 29 hearing on adult-use. State-by-state. NCIA, USCC, MPP. The 2026 cannabis public affairs landscape.
Federal lobbying spending hit $4.4B in 2024. The discipline is integrating — registered lobbying, earned media, coalition validators, and AI-visibility research inside a single operation. EPR's intelligence layer for government relations and lobbying.
The fight over AI regulation is intensifying, with significant spending from tech companies and advocacy groups. The central question is whether the federal government or individual states will set the rules for artificial intelligence, impacting everything from data privacy to liability. Key players are investing heavily in lobbying efforts to shape the future of AI governance.
The AI policy landscape is rapidly evolving across multiple jurisdictions, including Brussels, Sacramento, and Washington. This playbook details the challenges and strategies for public affairs in this complex environment, emphasizing the need for adaptable approaches beyond traditional federal-focused strategies.
Lobbying without communications increasingly underperforms. A 2008-era K Street firm could move a bill with 14 meetings and a check. The 2026 firm typically needs all of that plus earned media, coalition validators, hearing preparation, parallel state pressure, and measurable pre
Anthropic outspent OpenAI on federal lobbying for the first time in Q1 2026. Meta led all companies in 2025 with $26.29 million in lobbying — the most of any company in any industry. More than 3,570 federal lobbyists worked AI issues in 2025, equal to roughly one in four federal…