The Lobby They Named

Follow
the Money

In 2024 AIPAC spent $3.3 million on registered lobbying, which ranked it 191st out of 9,200 lobbies in Washington. The National Association of Realtors spent $86 million. If a realtors' association twenty-six times its size is not running the country, the arithmetic inside the accusation was never doing any work.

You have heard the claim in its short form for years. One lobby buys American Middle East policy. It is the rare accusation that comes with a receipt attached, because campaign money in the United States is public by law: every contribution over $200, every independent expenditure, every quarterly lobbying report, filed and posted.

So this page takes the claim at its word and opens the file. Every figure below comes from Federal Election Commission filings and Lobbying Disclosure Act reports as compiled by OpenSecrets, the nonpartisan research group whose entire purpose is exposing money in politics, plus the Brennan Center's count of the money nobody has to disclose. None of it is AIPAC's own accounting.

Four charts. Lobbying, super PACs, donors, and the party each one was buying. Then the part where the number is genuinely large, because there is one, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a smaller chart.

191st
AIPAC's rank among 9,200 registered federal lobbies by 2024 spending. Behind the realtors, the hospitals, the chemists, the retirees and the cable companies.
0.08%
AIPAC's share of the $4.4 billion spent lobbying the federal government in 2024, across 13,000 registered lobbyists and 80,400 filings.
0.6%
AIPAC's PAC and super PAC together, as a share of the $14.8 billion spent on the 2024 federal election. Take its critics' highest tally instead and it is 0.9%.
$1.9bn
Dark money in the 2024 races: spending whose donors are legally untraceable. Double the previous record. None of it is AIPAC's, whose every dollar is filed by name.
60 / 40
How AIPAC's money split between Democrats and Republicans. No other top-twenty donor in America is close to that even.
$288m
What one company, SpaceX, put into the 2024 cycle. That is more than five times AIPAC's contributions, from a single donor, and 99.7% of it went to one party.
What Washington's lobbies spent in 2024
Reported spending under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, calendar year 2024. This is the number the word lobby actually refers to: money paid to people whose job is talking to Congress. AIPAC is the gold bar at the bottom.

National Assn of Realtors

real estate

$86.4M

The single largest lobbying client in America, and the reason your mortgage-interest deduction survives every tax fight

US Chamber of Commerce

business

$76.4M

The permanent voice of American business in every committee room

PhRMA

pharmaceuticals

$31.7M

The drug manufacturers' association, on top of what each company spends by itself

American Hospital Assn

hospitals

$29.0M

American Fuel & Petrochem

oil and gas

$27.6M

Blue Cross / Blue Shield

insurance

$27.4M

American Medical Assn

physicians

$24.8M

Meta

internet

$24.4M

One company, outspending AIPAC's entire lobbying budget seven times over

Business Roundtable

business

$23.4M

American Chemistry Council

chemicals

$22.3M

AARP

retirees

$19.9M

Amazon

internet

$19.1M

RTX Corp

defence

$13.5M

The largest defence contractor on the list, for scale: the industry usually accused of writing the wars

AIPAC

pro-Israel

$3.3M · 191st of 9,200

The entire disclosed lobbying budget of the organisation said to buy American Middle East policy

1

Lobbying Disclosure Act filings, 2024 · OpenSecrets top spenders

That is the whole lobbying story, and it is over in one chart. The interesting money in American politics stopped being lobbying money in 2010, when Citizens United let organisations spend without limit on elections so long as they did not coordinate with a campaign. In 2024, 2,502 super PACs raised $5.1 billion between them. Here are the ten that spent the most, and AIPAC's.

The super PACs, by what they spent on ads
Independent expenditures in the 2024 cycle: money spent for or against candidates by groups that face no contribution limit at all. AIPAC's super PAC, the United Democracy Project, ranked 21st of 660.

Make America Great Again Inc

supports Trump

$376.9M

Raised $410.5M

WinSenate PAC

Democratic

$311.3M

The Senate Democrats' outside arm

Senate Leadership Fund

Republican

$211.1M

The Senate Republicans' outside arm

America PAC

Elon Musk

$172.0M

One man's super PAC, which raised $263.5M, three times what AIPAC's super PAC did

Preserve America PAC

supports Trump

$112.3M

Right for America

supports Trump

$69.6M

American Crossroads

Republican

$60.3M

Defend American Jobs

crypto

$57.8M

One of the three crypto-funded super PACs in the Fairshake network, which spent over $133M between them

Keystone Renewal PAC

supports McCormick

$54.4M

Win It Back PAC

Club for Growth

$53.7M

Republican money spent beating Republicans in Republican primaries

United Democracy Project

AIPAC's super PAC

$37.9M · 21st of 660

Concentrated almost entirely in a handful of Democratic House primaries, which is the whole of the case against it

1

FEC independent expenditure filings, 2023 to 2024 · OpenSecrets outside spending
The biggest donors in the country
Every federal dollar traced to an organisation in the 2023 to 2024 cycle: its PAC, its treasury, and the people who work for it. AIPAC finished 18th of 40,455. The nine above it are crypto exchanges, hedge funds, a shipping-supplies company and three billionaires.

SpaceX

Elon Musk

$288.7M

99.7% of it to Republicans

Miriam Adelson

Adelson Clinic

$146.9M

100% to Republicans. A pro-Israel megadonor whose money went to a party, not through AIPAC

Uline

shipping supplies

$146.0M

A packaging catalogue company, and the third-largest political donor in America

Citadel

hedge fund

$108.7M

Susquehanna International

trading firm

$101.5M

Andreessen Horowitz

venture capital

$89.0M

The crypto industry's largest backer, giving to both parties to protect one industry

Empower Parents PAC

school choice

$82.5M

Coinbase

crypto exchange

$79.0M

A single exchange, outspending AIPAC by half again

Elliott Management

hedge fund

$68.8M

Democracy PAC

George Soros

$67.2M

100% to Democrats

Bloomberg LP

Michael Bloomberg

$64.7M

98% to Democrats

AIPAC

pro-Israel

$51.8M · 18th of 40,455

79% of it from individual donors, forwarded under the ordinary $3,300 per-candidate limit, every name filed

1

All federal contributions, 2023 to 2024 · OpenSecrets top organization contributors
Now the same donors, ranked not by how much,
but by whose side they were buying.
Who the money went to
Each bar is one donor's partisan giving, split between Democrats and Republicans and drawn to the same width, so the comparison is direction rather than size. Every large donor in America buys a side. One of them does not.
To Democrats To Republicans
Shares of each donor's own combined Democratic and Republican giving, 2023 to 2024

A lobby that buys a foreign policy does not hand 60% of its money to one party and 40% to the other. That is the spending pattern of a group backing incumbents of both parties who already agree with it, which is what AIPAC has always said it does and what the filings show it doing. It endorsed the Democratic House leader and a Republican from Nebraska in the same cycle.

Buying a policy and backing the people who already hold it look nothing alike on a chart.

Where the number is genuinely big
Here is the part a fair page does not skip. Nationally AIPAC is a rounding error. In a handful of Democratic House primaries, which are cheap, low-turnout and decided by a few thousand votes, it was the largest spender in the country.
What AIPAC's super PAC did
  • $14.5 million in one House primary, New York's 16th, against Jamaal Bowman. Total outside spending in that race hit $25.4 million, the most expensive House primary ever run.
  • $8.6 million against Cori Bush in Missouri's 1st.
  • Two members of Congress lost their seats in races where a single-issue super PAC was the biggest voice on the air. That is real, and it is what the anger is about.
What everyone else was doing at the same time
  • Crypto. Fairshake and its two affiliates spent over $133 million on independent expenditures in 2024, more than any industry group in history, including $10 million to sink Katie Porter in a California Senate primary. It backed the winner in 33 of the 35 primaries it entered.
  • Club for Growth ran a super PAC called Win It Back that spent $53.7 million knocking off Republicans in Republican primaries.
  • One man, Elon Musk, put $288 million into the cycle through SpaceX and his own super PAC.
The complaint that survives is about primaries, not about Jews. A congressional primary can be won with a few million dollars, so any group with a few million dollars can decide one, and in 2024 the crypto exchanges did it more often, more expensively and with a better win rate than AIPAC did. The difference is that nobody wrote a chant about Coinbase. If unlimited outside money in low-turnout primaries is intolerable, and there is a serious case that it is, then the rule has to bind Fairshake and Club for Growth and Musk too, and the campaign to write it is sitting there unbuilt while its likeliest coalition argues about one super PAC in twenty-first place.
FEC independent expenditure filings · OpenSecrets race totals · Public Citizen on crypto spending
The foreign lobby

There is one more word in the accusation worth checking, and it is the word the whole thing rests on: foreign. AIPAC registers under the Lobbying Disclosure Act as a domestic American organisation, funded by American citizens. It takes no money from the Israeli government. Groups that work for a foreign state register instead under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and that register is public too.

On it you will find that Qatar spent roughly $260 million on US lobbying and public relations between 2016 and 2024. That averages about $29 million a year, roughly nine times AIPAC's entire 2024 lobbying budget, paid by a foreign government rather than by American citizens. Qatar is also the largest foreign funder of American universities, ahead of China and Saudi Arabia, and it hosts Hamas's political leadership in Doha. The Qatar file has the rest.

The foreign money in this fight is real. It just isn't AIPAC's.

The United States Supreme Court building at dusk, seen from the front steps.
The building where American campaign finance was actually decided. Citizens United v. FEC, January 2010, opened the unlimited outside spending that produced every bar on this page.Joe Ravi, CC BY-SA 3.0.
What actually buys Congress
If the objection is that money distorts American democracy, the objection is correct, and the disclosed pro-Israel money is the smallest part of it and the easiest part to see.
$1.9bn
Dark money in 2024, from nonprofits and shell companies that never have to name a donor. One group alone, Future Forward USA Action, moved over $304 million of it.
86%
Americans who want members of Congress barred from trading individual stocks: 87% of Republicans, 88% of Democrats, 81% of independents. It is still legal.
75%
Americans who back a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United, including two thirds of Republicans. Sixteen years on, no amendment has reached a floor vote.
Three quarters of the country agrees on the fix, across both parties, and it never gets built. Meanwhile a movement that says it exists to fight the influence of money on Washington has spent four years training its supporters to look at the 191st largest lobby in America, whose books are open, whose donors are named, whose money splits sixty-forty between the parties, and to see the hand behind everything. There is a name for choosing that target out of nine thousand.
Brennan Center dark money report, 2025 · University of Maryland Program for Public Consultation

What this page is not doing

Sources

Figures are cycle totals unless a calendar year is named, and lobbying and campaign money are never added together because they are different filings under different laws. Found an error? Check the work and tell us. Related: the myths, one by one, Qatar, and why "they control it" is the oldest version of this.