The Foreign Influence PR Study — 2026

Foreign Influeunce PR Study - 2026

A systematic analysis of how foreign governments, state-owned entities, and overseas principals pay U.S. public relations and public affairs firms — and what the FARA data reveals about the most concentrated corner of the U.S. PR industry

By the Everything-PR Research Team

For the first time, a comprehensive, industry-focused analysis of the foreign-financed segment of U.S. public relations — who is paying, who is earning, what the work actually consists of, and what an estimated $5 billion of cumulative foreign-principal spending over the past decade reveals about the firms that dominate a small, opaque, and rapidly shifting corner of the American PR market.

Key Statistics and Takeaways

Why this study exists

Every political reporter in Washington can name the top foreign lobbying firms. Every policy observer can identify Akin Gump, BGR Group, Mercury Public Affairs, Ballard Partners, and Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck as the dominant players in the foreign-principal category. But ask what the U.S. public relations industry as a whole earns each year from foreign governments, state-owned enterprises, and overseas principals — and which firms are actually capturing that revenue — and the answers become far harder to come by.

The foreign-principal segment of U.S. public relations is simultaneously the most disclosed and the least discussed corner of the industry. Unlike virtually every other category of PR spending, it is fully transparent by federal law. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), originally enacted in 1938 to counter Nazi propaganda networks, requires any U.S. individual or firm engaged in political, public-relations, or publicity activities on behalf of a foreign government, foreign political party, or foreign principal to register with the Department of Justice, disclose the terms of the engagement, report every payment received, and file every piece of distributed material within 48 hours of its release.

The data is public. Almost no one in the commercial PR industry reads it systematically. This study is an attempt to change that — drawing on DOJ FARA eFile records, aggregated analyses by OpenSecrets and the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Bloomberg Government’s annual lobbying firm revenue rankings, and PRWeek/O’Dwyer’s agency billings — to produce a systematic picture of who pays, who earns, and what the work actually looks like.

“FARA is the only segment of U.S. public relations where every dollar is federally disclosed. It is also the segment where industry-wide benchmarking is almost entirely absent. The two facts are related.”

Methodology & data sources

This study triangulates four independent data sources to produce country-level, firm-level, and activity-level estimates:

DOJ FARA eFile system (efile.fara.gov): The Department of Justice FARA Unit maintains a public database of every registration statement, supplemental statement, short-form filing, and piece of informational material filed under the statute. Supplemental statements filed every six months itemize receipts by foreign principal, political contributions made, and political activities conducted.

OpenSecrets Foreign Lobby Watch: A structured aggregation of FARA filings maintained by the Center for Responsive Politics. OpenSecrets data places cumulative foreign-principal spend on U.S. firms since 2016 at roughly $5 billion, with China leading at approximately $460 million, Qatar second at approximately $258 million, Saudi Arabia third at an estimated $220M+, and Israel fourth at approximately $194 million.

Quincy Institute foreign-lobbying analyses: A series of 2024–2025 research briefs categorized more than 130,000 discrete political activities conducted by U.S. firms on behalf of foreign principals during 2022 and 2023, including media contacts, in-person congressional meetings, dinner arrangements, and op-ed placements. FARA registrants also reported $14.3 million in political contributions over the same two-year window.

Bloomberg Government & PRWeek/O’Dwyer’s benchmarks: Agency-level revenue rankings cross-referenced against FARA registrant lists to identify which U.S. lobbying, public-affairs, and PR firms derive material revenue from foreign principals and the scale of that revenue.

A note on limitations: FARA data is disclosed only by registrants. Principals that route U.S.-facing activity through available exemptions — the Lobbying Disclosure Act exemption, the attorney-at-law exemption, academic and religious exemptions, and the “commercial activity” exemption — are not captured. The figures in this study represent a disclosed floor, not a ceiling, of actual foreign-principal PR spend in the U.S.

The benchmark: what the data actually shows

Based on the triangulated dataset, the foreign-principal segment of U.S. public relations is defined by four structural features:

1. Revenue concentration. Fewer than 20 U.S. firms capture the majority of FARA-disclosed revenue. The bottom 250 registrants combined earn less than the top five. A single firm — BGR Group — reported 16,866 discrete political activities on behalf of foreign principals during 2022–2023 alone, representing a volume of activity that is structurally impossible for any firm outside the top tier to match.

2. Country-of-origin concentration. Ten countries account for the majority of annual disclosed spend. In 2024, Japanese principals led at $48.5 million, followed by Saudi Arabia, China ($32.9M, down sharply from its $85.4M peak in 2023), South Korea, and Qatar. Israel, the UAE, Taiwan, Ukraine, and Azerbaijan round out the top ten.

3. Activity concentration. The work, by volume, is remarkably repetitive: congressional staff outreach, op-ed placement in a small cluster of newspapers (the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal dominate), event hosting, ambassador dinner coordination, and issue-specific advocacy around trade, defense procurement, sanctions relief, and state-visit preparation. UAE-linked agents alone contacted more than 500 media outlets over the period covered by Quincy Institute analysis.

4. Composition shift. Trade-promotion spend (JETRO, KOTRA, equivalent bodies) is rising while traditional political-influence spend is fragmenting. Japan’s 2024 spending ranked first in large part because of JETRO and an 8% year-over-year increase in Japanese corporate FARA-disclosed activity reported by Nikkei in mid-2025. The buyer profile is shifting from embassy press counselors in Washington toward trade-promotion directors operating from overseas capitals.

Foreign-principal payments to U.S. firms — by country of origin

Source: Everything-PR Research Team analysis of DOJ FARA filings, OpenSecrets Foreign Lobby Watch cumulative totals, Washington Examiner 2024 country rankings, Quincy Institute 2024–2025 briefs, and FDD reporting on Qatar. Estimates reflect disclosed FARA receipts only.

Firm tier benchmarks: what foreign-principal PR actually pays

FARA supplemental-statement data, cross-referenced with Bloomberg Government’s annual lobbying firm revenue rankings, reveals four distinct tiers of foreign-principal engagement within the U.S. PR and public affairs industry:

Tier 4 — Occasional registrants

$0–$500K annually from foreign principals

One-off or short-term engagements. Typically a single foreign-principal client, often a corporate rather than governmental entity. No dedicated FARA infrastructure. The majority of the 300+ registered firms fall here.

Tier 3 — Mid-tier foreign-principal firms

$500K–$3M annually from foreign principals

One to three recurring foreign-principal clients. Small dedicated FARA compliance function. Primarily congressional outreach and op-ed placement. Common among D.C. public-affairs firms in the $10M–$40M overall-revenue range.

Tier 2 — Major foreign-principal practices

$3M–$10M annually from foreign principals

Multiple concurrent foreign-government clients. Full-service FARA compliance. Integrated with federal lobbying practices. Includes Ballard Partners, Mercury Public Affairs, BGR Group at the practice-group level, and specialized shops such as American Defense International and Stryk Global.

Tier 1 — Foreign-principal dominant firms

$10M+ annually from foreign principals

Multi-country, multi-year foreign-principal portfolios. Often the single largest revenue segment within the firm. FARA-registered political activities measured in the thousands per year. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld leads on in-person meetings secured. BGR Group leads on total political activities. Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, which topped Bloomberg Government’s overall 2024 lobbying-firm revenue ranking at $67.9M, operates a significant foreign-principal practice alongside its domestic work.

Firm-by-firm: who dominates the foreign-principal category

Source: Everything-PR Research Team analysis of FARA filings, Quincy Institute 2024 rankings, and Bloomberg Government 2024 top-performing lobbying firms analysis.

The two surprises

Surprise #1: The cumulative dollar volume is much larger than most industry benchmarks capture. OpenSecrets data places cumulative foreign-principal spend on U.S. firms since 2016 at roughly $5 billion. Qatar alone has now spent approximately $258 million cumulatively — including nearly $250 million since 2016 across 88 different FARA-registered lobbying and public relations firms — and its agents logged 627 in-person meetings with U.S. political contacts between January 2021 and June 2025, more than those reported by any other country in the world. These are not small numbers relative to the broader U.S. public relations industry, and yet they are largely absent from standard agency benchmarking, O’Dwyer’s rankings, and PRWeek agency profiles.

Surprise #2: Composition is shifting faster than the industry recognizes. China’s disclosed spend has fallen sharply from its $85.4 million peak in 2023 to $32.9 million in 2024 — a decline of more than 60% in a single year, concentrated in state-media registrants rather than traditional lobbying. Japan, South Korea, and Qatar are now driving the top of the annual rankings, with trade-promotion and commercial diplomacy replacing political-influence advocacy as the dominant use of funds. The conventional narrative — that FARA is a Saudi-and-China story — is out of date. The actual story is structural diversification.

“China’s FARA-disclosed spend fell more than 60% in a single year. Japan now leads the annual table. That is not a narrative shift — it is a market shift, and the U.S. PR industry has yet to price it in.”

What the money actually buys

One of the most undercovered aspects of the foreign-principal PR market is how narrow the activity mix actually is. Quincy Institute analysis of 2022–2023 FARA filings categorized more than 130,000 discrete political activities performed by U.S. firms on behalf of foreign principals, distributed across a handful of recurring categories:

•     Congressional staff outreach and meeting requests — the single largest activity category by volume

•     Op-ed placement and pitch emails to mainstream media — The Washington Post (1,257 recorded contacts in 2022–23), The New York Times (924), and The Wall Street Journal (886) dominate, with Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN, and Politico rounding out the top ten

•     Ambassador dinner coordination — one major firm alone logged 107 discrete activities in 2022–23 related to arranging dinners between members of Congress and Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States

•     Event and conference hosting — JETRO, KOTRA, and similar trade-promotion bodies anchor this category

•     Issue-specific advocacy — sanctions relief, export controls, weapons procurement, tariff negotiation, state-visit preparation

•     Campaign contributions by registrants — $14.3 million in political contributions reported by FARA registrants in 2022–23 combined

•     Episodic crisis response — UAE post–Yemen coverage, Saudi Arabia post-Khashoggi, Qatar post–World Cup labor coverage, Ukraine post-invasion, Azerbaijan post–Nagorno-Karabakh

What is conspicuously absent from FARA filings: modern integrated digital communications, paid social amplification, influencer programs, ESG reporting, stakeholder advisory, and the crisis-infrastructure services that Fortune 500 companies routinely purchase from commercial PR agencies. The foreign-principal PR market is, in aggregate, buying a narrower range of services than the domestic corporate market.

The PR-to-lobbying ratio and the unit economics

Federal lobbying spending reached a record $4.5 billion in 2024, according to Bloomberg Government’s annual analysis. Against that figure, cumulative foreign-principal disclosed spend of roughly $5 billion since 2016 represents a relatively small but highly concentrated specialist market — one that is measured in hundreds of millions rather than billions in any single year. What makes the segment distinctive is not its size relative to the overall influence industry, but its structural characteristics: fewer firms, larger average client retainers, narrower activity mix, and far higher compliance burden than comparable domestic public-affairs work. The unit economics favor scale and specialization, which helps explain why the category concentrates so heavily in a small number of D.C.-based firms.

The FARA enforcement environment: 2024–2026

The regulatory environment around FARA has shifted materially in the past two years. The 2024 FARA reforms opened full registrant political-activity and campaign-contribution data to the public for the first time, producing the dataset this study draws on. The 2024–2025 period saw high-profile indictments of current and former federal and state public officials acting as undisclosed foreign agents. In February 2025, however, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memorandum narrowing prosecutorial priorities to espionage-adjacent cases and disbanding the Foreign Influence Task Force. Since the Bondi memo, DOJ has continued prosecuting pending FARA and FARA-related matters — including the April 2025 guilty plea of former CIA officer Dale Bendler under 18 U.S.C. § 219, and a June 2025 superseding indictment of former New York gubernatorial aide Linda Sun adding fraud and bribery charges to her existing FARA counts (trial ended in a hung jury in December 2025) — while new § 611 charging activity has slowed.

At the state level, the opposite pattern has emerged. Arkansas enacted a “Baby FARA” statute in April 2025, followed by Nebraska in May 2025. Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, New York, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and West Virginia have all introduced or debated similar legislation, with particular focus on “hostile foreign principals” (variously defined to include China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and in some states Cuba and Syria). For U.S. PR and public-affairs firms, the net effect is a lower federal enforcement risk but a rising and increasingly fragmented state-level compliance burden.

What this means for PR industry observers, communications leaders, and compliance officers

1. The foreign-principal segment deserves a permanent place in U.S. PR industry benchmarking. The category is larger, more concentrated, and more data-rich than standard agency-ranking publications reflect. The absence of a regular industry-level benchmarking product has contributed to a collective blind spot in how the PR business measures its own total addressable market.

2. The activity mix signals an underserved buyer. Foreign principals are, in aggregate, purchasing a narrower range of services than domestic corporate buyers of comparable scale. The repetitive concentration on congressional outreach and op-eds in three or four newspapers suggests that even sophisticated sovereign buyers are not accessing the full suite of modern integrated communications capabilities available in the broader PR industry.

3. The compliance bar has risen even as federal enforcement has fallen. For U.S. firms — PR, public affairs, or legal — considering entry into the foreign-principal segment, state-level “Baby FARA” statutes and reform proposals mean the compliance workload is now more complex than at any point in the statute’s history. Any firm operating in or adjacent to the category in 2026 needs a dedicated compliance counsel, a written client-intake protocol, a 48-hour informational-materials filing workflow, a semi-annual supplemental-statement process, and a clear internal policy on which countries and principals the firm will and will not represent. The reputational risks of a misstep are higher than the nominal federal enforcement risk suggests.

This study was produced by the Everything-PR Research Team and is available for republication with attribution. For inquiries: everything-pr.com.

Methodology note: All figures derive from publicly disclosed FARA filings available through the DOJ FARA eFile system (efile.fara.gov), aggregated FARA analyses published by the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets Foreign Lobby Watch), foreign-lobbying research published by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, reporting by the Washington Examiner, Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and Global Investigative Journalism Network, Bloomberg Government’s 2024 top-performing lobbying firms analysis, and PRWeek/O’Dwyer’s 2024 agency rankings. All disclosed figures traceable to primary-source filings; all modeled estimates labeled as such.