About Half of Retiring Senators and a Third of Retiring House Members Register as Lobbyists

Lee Drutman wrote for Vox about the revolving door between lobbying and Congressmen:

Members of Congress now make $174,000 a year — not a bad living. But usually they can at least quintuple that salary by switching over to lobbying once they retire. And many of them do just that.

A new study by three political scientists has some good data on the trends. Jeffrey Lazarus, Amy McKay, and Lindsey Herbel went all the way back to 1976 to see who went on to lobby after leaving Congress. Their results are reported in a new article, "Who walks through the revolving door? Examining the lobbying activity of former members of Congress," in the journal Interest Groups & Advocacy. 

As the graph makes clear, the rate of retiring members going to lobby has grown steadily over time, though it seems to have peaked around 2000. The Senate exhibits more up and downs because fewer senators retire each year, making the percentage trends more sensitive to small fluctuations.

Back in the 1970s and '80s, it was relatively rare for former Congress members to become lobbyists. This makes sense, since the lobbying industry was not nearly as big then. The real growth of lucrative Washington lobbying has been since the 1990s, trends that I document in my book The Business of America Is Lobbying: How Corporations Became Politicized and Politics Became More Corporate. Now reported lobbying is a$3.2 billion-a-year activity.

***