Data source

The MA Secretary of State publishes semi-annual lobbying disclosure filings for all registered lobbyists and lobbying entities in Massachusetts. Filers report which clients hired them, how much each client paid, and which specific bills they lobbied on behalf of each client (with chamber, bill number, title, and position — Support, Oppose, or Neutral).

Data is available from 2005 (184th General Court) through the present, spanning 22 years across 11 legislative sessions. Each two-year legislative session is identified by a General Court number (GC 184 = 2005–2006, GC 194 = 2025–2026, etc.).

The data from this source has been archived on this site, last updated on 17 June 2026 05:56 pm. Filings are refreshed automatically on a weekly basis; the script exits early when no new semi-annual filings have been posted.

Compensation (lobbying spend)

Total lobbying spend is the sum of the compensation column across all rows of the employers table (both registrant types — lobbying entities and individual lobbyists). The figures do not need de-duplication: under the Secretary of the Commonwealth’s filing rules each client payment is reported exactly once — by the lobbying entity or by the individual lobbyist, never both:

“Compensation paid by the client should be reported either as an amount received by the lobbyist entity, or as an amount received by the individual lobbyist. The same payment should not be reported in both sections.” — Entity Disclosure Reporting User Guide, Form 2, p.8 (see also the Lobbyist Division and the lobbying statute, M.G.L. c.3 §§39–50).

On this basis, total reported compensation reached $100M in 2025, roughly $949M cumulatively over 2005–2025. Note: filings from 2005–2008 use an older format that reports only an entity-level salary total (no per-client breakdown), so those years are best presented at the entity level. Two separate money streams are tracked in their own tables and are not part of spend: salaries paid by an entity to its lobbyists, and campaign contributions made by lobbyists.

Bills vs. executive/regulatory activity: the bills table records lobbying on legislative bills and on executive/regulatory matters. For the latter the source’s “Bill Number or Agency Name” field holds an agency name (e.g. “Office of the Governor”) and the chamber is Executive. To count legislative bills, use distinct bill_id (chamber-prefixed) or filter to House/Senate Bill/Docket chambers — not raw activity rows.

Environmental relevance & taxonomy

Each bill is classified by an LLM (Gemini 2.5 Flash), which reads the bill title and text and returns a plain-English summary, a policy category and tags (from a fixed 21-category / 183-tag taxonomy), and an environmental relevance judgment. This LLM flag (is_environmental) is authoritative — in spot-checks it achieved ~100% recall and ~97% specificity, far better than a purely embedding-based classifier, which missed many clearly environmental bills (e.g. the bottle bill, net metering). 4889 of 36780 uniquely lobbied bills (~13.3%) are flagged environmental.

As a secondary numeric feature, each bill also carries an embedding-based env_relevance_score: its full text (from the MA Legislature OpenAPI) is stripped of repeated legislative scaffolding, prepended with the title, truncated to 3,000 characters, and embedded with Google’s Gemini Embedding model (gemini-embedding-2, 768-dim). The score is the differential cosine similarity to reference sets of known environmental vs. non-environmental bills. It is retained for ranking/analysis but is no longer the classification of record.

Data coverage note: Bills from the two oldest legislative sessions (GC 183–184, 2005–2008) have no full text in the Legislature API and are often missing titles in the lobbying portal as well. These ~1,500 bills embed as zero vectors and are excluded from topic clustering (assigned cluster_id = -1). They are retained in the lobbying activity data but do not appear in the t-SNE visualization.

Embeddings are stored in a Parquet file on Google Cloud Storage (gs://openamend-data/MA_bill_embeddings.parquet) alongside bill full text. The lightweight scored CSV (scores and cluster IDs only, no embeddings) is committed to this repository.

Topic clustering

All lobbied bills with valid embeddings (36710 bills) are clustered into 25 topic groups using the k-means clustering algorithm on the L2-normalised Gemini embeddings (cosine-space clustering). Each cluster is labelled using Gemini 2.5 Flash, which receives the 20 most central bill titles in the cluster and returns a 3–5 word topic label. Clustering is a one-time operation re-run manually when the historical data changes significantly.

Cluster	Label	Bills	Env. bills
0	Community and Environmental Policy	1983	49
1	Patient Safety, Staff Autonomy, Transparency	1289	1
2	Solid Waste Reduction and Recycling	463	178
3	Student Education and Well-being	1572	7
4	Infrastructure Investment and Economic Growth	1124	8
5	Data Privacy and Security	1358	4
6	Special Commissions and Studies	1013	14
7	Tax Reform and Exemptions	1270	1
8	Local Affordable Housing Options	1148	7
9	Youth, Crime, and Public Safety	1175	5
10	Mental and Behavioral Health Access	629	0
11	Firearms Regulation and Ownership	668	6
12	Public Safety Personnel Retirement	1256	0
13	Public Health, Economy, Environment	651	13
14	Massachusetts Clean Energy Transition	799	235
15	Prescription Drug Pricing, Access, Safety	781	1
16	Wage Theft and Worker Protections	1281	2
17	Elder Long-Term Care Services	921	0
18	Healthcare Coverage and Affordability	1142	0
19	State Funding for Programs	862	12
20	Local Clean Energy Transition	1058	54
21	Automobile Insurance Premiums and Surcharges	745	12
22	State Fiscal and Policy Initiatives	1084	29
23	Authorizing Local Liquor Licenses	521	0
24	Automotive Safety and Technology Regulation	1123	5

Bill embedding space (t-SNE)

The plot below shows environmental bills projected into the policy landscape using t-SNE. Coloured, outlined dots are the environmentally-relevant bills (4889), coloured by topic cluster; grey dots are a stratified background sample (~120 per cluster, ~3,000 total) providing geographic context. Hover over any point for the bill title.

Note: MA legislative bill embeddings are semantically dense — even after boilerplate stripping, mean inter-cluster cosine distance is only ~0.006 vs. mean intra-cluster spread of ~0.53. Visualising all 36780 bills produces a featureless blob because the underlying high-dimensional structure does not project cleanly to two dimensions. The subsample approach makes the environmentally-relevant bills legible without misrepresenting the cluster separation.

Download archive

Full CSVs are stored in Google Cloud Storage (too large for the repository). These links will be active once the initial full-history scrape is complete and uploaded:

• Lobbying employers (entity–client–year, with compensation) — gs://openamend-data/MA_lobbying_employers.csv
• Lobbying bills (entity–client–bill–year) — gs://openamend-data/MA_lobbying_bills.csv
• Lobbying bills scored (env relevance + cluster) — gs://openamend-data/MA_lobbying_bills_scored.csv
• Lobbyist↔entity mapping + salaries — gs://openamend-data/MA_lobbying_lobbyists.csv
• Campaign contributions (lobbyist → recipient) — gs://openamend-data/MA_lobbying_campaign_contributions.csv
• Itemized expenses (operating / meals-travel-entertainment / additional) — gs://openamend-data/MA_lobbying_expenses.csv
• Per-client annual amount + purpose text — gs://openamend-data/MA_lobbying_client_purposes.csv
• Legislature bill metadata — gs://openamend-data/MA_legislature_bills.csv
• Bill embeddings (768-dim Parquet)

Data tables

Lobbying Employers

One row per (entity, client, year). Records how much each client paid each lobbying entity in a given year.

Entity Name	Client Name	Year	Reg Type	Compensation
Minahan Companies, The	total_salary	2005	Lobbyist Entity	75000.0
Capital Associates Inc.	total_salary	2005	Lobbyist Entity	60000.0
Burke & Mawn Consultants	total_salary	2005	Lobbyist Entity	39000.0
Brown Rudnick Berlack Israels LLP	total_salary	2005	Lobbyist Entity	12500.0
Ventry Associates, LLP	total_salary	2005	Lobbyist Entity	30499.97
Offices of Gerard D’Amico	total_salary	2005	Lobbyist Entity	31317.5
Liberty Square DC	total_salary	2005	Lobbyist Entity	45000.0
Grant Associates	total_salary	2005	Lobbyist Entity	30000.0
Gregory & Associates	total_salary	2005	Lobbyist Entity	68720.0
Law Office of John J. McGlynn, Jr.	total_salary	2005	Lobbyist Entity	183431.0

Lobbying Bills

One row per (entity, client, bill, session). Records which bills each entity lobbied on behalf of each client, with the lobbying position.

Entity Name	Client Name	Year	Chamber	Bill	Bill Title	Position
Robert Alan Baker	Smaller Business Association of New England	2014	House Bill	H4165	An Act Promoting Economic Growth Across the Commonwealth….	Support
Joseph M Corazzini	Clark University	2025	Executive		Review and assess Higher education related issues that ma…	Support
Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP	Steward Health Care LLC	2013	SB	S3	Text of the recommended amendment to the House Bill makin…	Support
Law Office of Attorney James F McGrail	Outfront Media, LLC	2018	Executive		Matters in connection with Outfront Media Group LLC’s par…	Support
Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP	Steward Health Care LLC	2012	HB	H4070	An Act relative to Health Care Quality Improvement and Co…	Support
Thomas Cremin	Northeast Utilities System	2011	HB	H3125	HB2617 HB2625 HB2629
HB2621 HB122 BH132 HB219 HB223 HB253…	Neutral
Robert Alan Baker	Smaller Business Association of New England	2011	House Bill	H2293		Oppose
Dewey Square Group, LLC	Vanguard Health Systems	2012	HB	H284	- An Act relative to insurer responsibility for collectin…	Neutral
Murphy Donoghue Partners	Massachusetts Mutual Insurnace Company	2013	HB	H1	- Governor - An Act making appropriations for FY2014
HB7 …	Neutral
Donoghue Barrett & Singal, P.C.	Massachusetts Mutual Insurnace Company	2013	HB	H1	An Act making appropriations for FY2014
HB17 Recommendati…	Neutral

Legislature Bills

Bill metadata fetched from the MA Legislature OpenAPI. Includes sponsor, final status, and derived passed boolean. Environmental relevance scores and cluster IDs are stored separately in MA_lobbying_bills_scored.csv (see above).

Bill	General Court	Title	Sponsor	Status	Passed
H4999	193	An Act promoting access to midwifery care and out-of-hosp…	Midwifery Care and Out-of-Hospital options	Signed by the Governor, Chapter 186 o…	1
H4773	193	An Act promoting access to midwifery care and out-of-hosp…	House Committee on Ways and Means	Published as amended, see H4785	0
S1405	193	An Act relative to newborn screenings for congenital cyto…	Joan B. Lovely	No further action taken	0
S607	193	An Act to increase access to nurse-midwifery services	Brendan P. Crighton	No further action taken	0
H1069	193	An Act to increase access to nurse-midwifery services	Kay Khan	Senate concurred	0
H1202	193	An Act to preserve special needs trusts for disabled seniors	Kate Hogan	New draft substituted, see H4841	0
S108	193	An Act establishing guardians as providers of medical car…	Joan B. Lovely	Accompanied a study order, see S2795	0
H5033	193	An Act to improve quality and oversight of long-term care	Long Term Care	Signed by the Governor, Chapter 197 o…	1
H4800	193	An Act making appropriations for the fiscal year 2025 for…	General Appropriation Bill, FY25	Item 7066-0036 passed over veto - 155…	0
H2007	193	An Act enabling physician assistants to authorize psychia…	Edward R. Philips	Accompanied a study order, see H4897	0

Lobbyist–Entity Mapping

One row per (lobbyist, employing entity, year), with the salary the entity paid that lobbyist. The salary is an internal entity-to-lobbyist payment and is separate from client compensation above.

Lobbyist	Entity	Year	Salary
Robert M. Platt	National Consulting,LLC	2005	240500.0
Alfred A Minahan	Minahan Companies, The	2005	79000.0
John F Hahesy	Minahan Companies, The	2005	71000.0
John R Sasso	Advanced Strategies	2005	109200.0
Henry S Gillet	HSG & Associates	2005	25000.0
William F Malloy, Jr.	Malloy Group, Inc., The	2005	219899.0
Lisa M Hewitt, Esq.	Sheehy & Hewitt, Attorneys At Law	2005	0.0
Shawn K Sheehy, Esq.	Sheehy & Hewitt, Attorneys At Law	2005	0.0
Michael J McCormack, Esq.	Michael J. McCormack Esq	2005	120000.0
Charles F Flaherty	Flaherty & Associates	2005	341500.0

Campaign Contributions

Political contributions made by lobbyists, disclosed in their lobbying reports. One row per contribution.

Lobbyist	Recipient	Office Sought	Date	Amount	Reporting Entity	Year
Joseph M Grant	Sal Dimasi	Representative	2/15/2005	200.0	Grant Associates	2005
Joseph M Grant	Mark Montigney	Senate	2/15/2005	200.0	Grant Associates	2005
Joseph M Grant	Michael Morrisey	Senate	2/15/2005	200.0	Grant Associates	2005
Joseph M Grant	Robert Antonioni	Senate	3/22/2005	200.0	Grant Associates	2005
Joseph M Grant	Joseph Wagner	Representative	4/22/2005	200.0	Grant Associates	2005
Joseph M Grant	Thomas Kennedy	Representative	4/22/2005	200.0	Grant Associates	2005
Joseph M Grant	Richard Moore	Senate	5/25/2005	200.0	Grant Associates	2005
Joseph M Grant	Andrea Nuciforo	Senate	5/4/2005	200.0	Grant Associates	2005
Joseph M Grant	Robert Deleo	Representative	6/20/2005	200.0	Grant Associates	2005
Joseph M Grant	William Galvin	Representative	6/22/2005	200.0	Grant Associates	2005

Expenses

Itemized lobbying expenses by type (operating, meals_entertainment_travel, additional). One row per expense; blank $0 template rows are excluded.

Entity	Year	Type	Date	Payee	Description	Amount
Grant Associates	2005	additional	1/1 to 6/30	1/1 to 6/30	Boston View Corporation Office and pa…	5175.0
Grant Associates	2005	additional	1/1 to 6/30	1/1 to 6/30	Verizon NSTAR utilites	590.0
Grant Associates	2005	additional			Total amount	5765.0
Eric Bourassa	2005	operating	7/1/2005-12/31/2005	Verizon	Telephone, cell phone, handheld	30.0
Eric Bourassa	2005	operating	7/1/2005-12/31/2005	US Postal SErvice	Postage, shipping, delivery	15.0
Eric Bourassa	2005	operating			Total operating expenses	45.0
Evan Feinman	2005	operating	7/1/2005-12/31/2005	copies and copy service	Printing expenses	30.0
Evan Feinman	2005	operating	7/1/2005-12/31/2005	us postal service	Postage, shipping, delivery	5.0
Evan Feinman	2005	operating	7/1/2005-12/31/2005	verizon and covad	Telephone, cell phone, handheld	20.0
Evan Feinman	2005	operating			Total operating expenses	55.0

Client Purposes

Per-client annual summary: the annual amount a client paid and a free-text description of the lobbying purpose. One row per (entity, client, year).

Entity	Client	Year	Amount	Purpose
Monica Lawton	Associated Subcontractors of Massachusetts, Inc	2005	15500.0
James D Shaer	Boston University	2005	25704.0
Jo Ann Fitzgerald	Mass. Teachers Association	2005	2778.7
Stephen J. D’Amato	Center for Insurance Research, Inc.	2005	3662.0
Margaret G Grant	Mass. Assoc. of Realtors	2005	10000.0
Sheelah A Feinberg	The Women’s Union	2005	9080.0
James M. Machado	Mass. Police Association	2005	10000.0
Bridget Quinn	Mass. Organization of State Engineers & Scientists	2005	50259.89
Richard C Lord	Associated Industries of Mass.	2005	55000.0
Joanne Blum	Mass. Teachers Association	2005	93091.81