How We Map Spending to Policy Events

Methodology for the figures shown on policy event pages

What a Policy Event Is

A policy event is a single, docket-anchored action by a US financial regulator or by Congress, such as a capital-requirements vote, an enforcement decision, or a rulemaking. Each event records an official title, the issuing regulator, the relevant dates, a docket or bill identifier, and a link to the primary record on the Federal Register, regulations.gov, or the regulator's own site. Where the event corresponds to a rule already catalogued in our database, it links to that record. Thus the positions and issuing-agency relationships already attached to the rule appear on the event.

Positions

Positions show which entities engaged with an event and how. They come from two sources. The first is our existing relationships graph: public statements, testimony, and advocacy already recorded against a rule, each carrying its own citation. The second is lobbying disclosure. Where a financial-sector entity filed a Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act report that names the event's specific subject, we record a position of engagement. A link to the filing is the evidence. A lobbying disclosure shows that an entity worked to influence a rule. It does not by itself state support or opposition. Thus those positions are marked as engagement rather than a direction. Lobbying-derived positions are tagged as an editorial topical inference, never presented as a filed statement of position.

How Spending Is Scoped to an Event

The spending figure on an event is the tracked political giving from entities in the sectors the event bears on (for example large banks for a capital rule, or digital-asset firms for a crypto measure), summed over the year leading up to the event date. It is not a total for the industry. Sector membership uses the same tags applied across the rest of the site. The lobbying figure is the reported spend on the relevant Lobbying Disclosure Act issue codes (such as banking and financial institutions) over the surrounding filing window. Both figures are drawn only from records held in this database.

What the Numbers Do and Do Not Mean

Every dollar figure is a tracked, window-scoped, sector-scoped measure. It is not a claim about the total money behind a rule. Nor is it a claim that any specific dollar was spent to influence that specific outcome. Lobbying reports cover multiple issues at once. Thus a client's reported spend is not attributable to a single event. Where tracked giving can be split into independent expenditures supporting or opposing a position, that split is shown. The remainder is direct contributions, which carry no stated direction. Figures reconcile against FEC and Senate disclosure records as the tracked totals they are. They are labelled as such rather than as cycle-wide industry totals.

Limits

The one-year window is a transparent heuristic, not a causal finding. Sector attribution is coarse. A firm that gives across many issues is counted whenever it carries the relevant sector tag. Position coverage depends on what has been disclosed and matched so far. An absence of positions on an event means none have been recorded, not that none exist. The feature is a factual join between two public datasets: political spending and specific regulatory events. Readers can follow every figure to its primary source and judge it independently.