Military

US Military Contractors

Lockheed Martin spent over $12.8 million in 2020 on lobbying Congress, just slightly less than the $12.9 million the company reported in 2019 when it placed third among contractors in lobbying spending. Boeing was a close second with $12.6 million, down from $13.8 million in 2019. Northrop Grumman placed third with $11.7 million, while General Dynamics disclosed $10.7 million � both roughly the same as 2019. And Raytheon Technologies rounded out the top five with $7.4 million in lobbying spending. (United Technologies, which merged with Raytheon in April, also reported $4.9 million in the first quarter of 2020.) Textron racked up $4.5 million in lobbying spending, a big increase from the $2.7 million it spent in 2019. Shipbuilder Huntington Ingalls Industries spent $4.5 million in 2020, down from $6.5 million a year earlier. Drone maker General Atomics and Emergent BioSolutions were roughly on par with their 2019 expenditures, reporting $4.3 million and $3.7 million, respectively. And L3Harris rounded out the list, spending $3.2 million last year, down from the $5.8 million in 2019. Total for defense industry in 2020 was $103,921,230, down from a peak of $153,000,000 in 2008.

In addition to campaign contributions to elected officials and candidates, companies, labor unions, and other organizations spend billions of dollars each year to lobby Congress and federal agencies. Some special interests retain lobbying firms, many of them located along Washington's legendary K Street; others have lobbyists working in-house. The Center for Responsive Politics based on data from the Senate Office of Public Records calculated total lobbying spending in the year 2020 at $3.5 billion, with 11,500 resitered lobbyists. The National Association of Realtors spent $84 million on lobbying, more than any other organization. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent nearly $82 million on lobbying in 2020, the first time the business lobbying giant didn�t claim the top spot among lobbying spenders since 2000. Tech giants Amazon [$18.7 million] and Facebook [$18.7 million] topped all other companies on lobbying spending in 2020, bested only by massive trade associations.

On 07 January 2026 President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to stop defense contractors from putting stock buybacks and excessive corporate distributions ahead of production capacity, innovation, and on-time delivery for America�s military. The Order directs the Secretary of War to identify defense contractors that underperform, fail to invest their own capital in production capacity, insufficiently prioritize U.S. government contracts, or maintain inadequate production speed while spending money that could be spent on those critical needs on stock buybacks or corporate distributions.




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