Federal Lobbying and PAC Contribution Data Are Now Live in Tako

Note: From time to time I go work in the knowledge factory to see what’s easy and what’s hard. We have a lot of infra to solve problems like entity disambiguation and tooling to help validate data, methodology and metric definitions. This was a fun one.

Today is Election Day for the 2026 midterms, and federal lobbying reports and corporate PAC contributions to federal candidates are now in Tako’s knowledge graph, from 2008 on. Ask in plain language and get a chart, a description, and the rows behind it, with filings already deduplicated and matched to companies and politicians.

What you can ask

1. “Big Tech lobbying spending”: Meta led at $26.3 million in 2025, ahead of Amazon at $17.8 million.
2. “Total federal lobbying spending over time”: $5.27 billion in 2025, the most of any year since 2008.
3. “Amazon lobbying activity”: the company page’s Lobbying tab: $17.8 million in 2025, through 17 outside firms.
4. “Which AI companies spend the most on lobbying”: Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet lead.
5. “Anthropic vs OpenAI lobbying spending”: Anthropic spent $3.13 million in 2025, OpenAI $2.99 million.
6. “Top lobbying clients on taxes”: ranked by each client’s total spending, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce led at $70.3 million in 2025.
7. “Top lobbying firms by income”: Ballard Partners reported $88.1 million in 2025.
8. “Akin Gump lobbying income”: $65.5 million from 297 clients in 2025.
9. “Exxon Mobil PAC”: the company page’s PAC Money tab: $559,133 to 137 candidates in the 2024 cycle.
10. “Exxon Mobil PAC share of contributions to Republicans”: 73% in 2024, down from 91% in 2012.
11. “Lockheed Martin PAC contributions to Kay Granger”: $10,000 in every cycle from 2008 to 2022.
12. “Shelley Moore Capito corporate PAC contributions received”: $1.58 million in 2014 and $1.49 million in 2020, her two Senate races.
13. “Shelley Moore Capito”: the politician page: offices, party, terms, and a PAC Money tab.

How Tako counts

• Lobbying: the latest version of each filing, and each quarter a client’s own expenses or its firms’ reported income, whichever is larger, never both. A report gives one amount for every issue and agency it names, so issue and agency rankings use each client’s total across all its reports.
• PAC contributions: corporate and trade association PACs only, net of refunds, including refunds some PACs record as new contributions. Totals are per two-year election cycle, and each recipient’s party is the one they ran under that cycle.
• Companies and politicians: subsidiaries that file under their own names roll into their parent by current ownership, and every FEC candidate id a politician has used links to one person.

The matching happens once, when the filings enter the graph, not on every request. Knowledge Graphs vs. Data Connectors explains why that matters for agents.

Get the data with the answer

Set include_contents on a search request and each card carries every row it plots. Already have a card? Pass its URL to the Contents API for a CSV.

import os

import requests

response = requests.post(
    "https://tako.com/api/v3/search/",
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["TAKO_API_KEY"]},
    json={
        "query": "Anthropic vs OpenAI lobbying spending",
        "sources": {"data": {"include_contents": True}},
    },
)

dataset = response.json()["cards"][0]["content"]["dataset"]
print([column["name"] for column in dataset["columns"]])
for row in dataset["rows"]:
    print(row)

Next to the rest of a company’s story

Lobbying and PAC money join federal contracts in Tako. Lockheed Martin spent $15.6 million on lobbying in 2025, its PACs gave $1.52 million to federal candidates in the 2024 cycle, and it received $75.7 billion in federal contract obligations in fiscal 2025: