Just 50 companies dropped $714 million on lobbying last year

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A full quarter of all lobbyist spending in 2015 — some $714 million out of $3.2 billion — came from just 50 companies and trade organizations, per data tallied for The Hill.

The top 50 list is dominated by familiar names like Verizon, Comcast, Amazon, Facebook, Boeing, General Electric, Alphabet (Google's new parent company), Lockheed Martin, CVS, Coca-Cola, and Microsoft. Topping the list is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which alone spent $84 million in 2015, more than the next three lobbying organizations combined.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.