The Energy Sector Has Spent Hundreds of Millions of Dollars on Lobbying

The energy and natural resource sector has spent hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying the federal government so far this year, according to data compiled by the nonprofit OpenSecrets.

That spending comes amid a wave of policy wins for fossil fuel interests—and significant setbacks for environmental and green energy groups.

Nearly $240 million poured in during the first and second quarters of 2025, with about 2,200 lobbyists representing the sector—nearly half of whom are former government employees themselves. That spending puts the sector slightly ahead of last year’s pace, when its yearly total reached $435 million.

This year’s expenditures make energy and natural resources the fifth-largest lobbying sector that OpenSecrets tracked over this period—ahead of transportation, defense and labor.

Electric utilities represented the largest share of those expenditures, totaling nearly $75 million.

That’s more than half of what it spent in all of 2024 combined—the industry’s biggest year in over a decade.

And with about $71 million already spent on lobbying this year, the oil and gas industry continues to significantly outpace the renewable industry’s lobbying expenditures of roughly $40 million.

The totals for oil and gas so far this year put the industry slightly below the pace of last year’s expenditures, which totaled over $150 million—its highest since 2009.

However, watchdog organizations say the industry’s steady funding is actually the result of its existing influence within the federal government.

“When you’ve got a White House that has made clear that they’re going to do whatever you want, you don’t have to spend as much money to get results,” said Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. “They had to spend more when you had bipartisan, shared control over government, and you didn’t have a rubber stamp in the Oval Office. Now they do.”

Since President Donald Trump took office, his administration and Republicans in Congress have pushed through a slew of regulatory and legislative measures fulfilling the priorities of fossil fuel interests, often at the expense of renewables.

The party’s signature legislation, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, has been criticized as a handout to the fossil fuel industry that increases lease sales for drilling and mandates that millions of acres of federal lands be made available for mining.

Mike Sommers, president of the American Petroleum Institute, told CNBC at the time that the bill “includes almost all of our priorities.”

The administration has also granted Clean Air Act exemptions to dozens of fossil fuel-burning power plants, delaying their need to reduce emissions of mercury and other air toxins. 

And the EPA’s announcement that it intends to rescind its “endangerment finding” for greenhouse gases would remove the basis for its ability to regulate emissions from motor…