Projects

LobbyLinks

LobbyLinks is an evolving project that builds networks between political actors and organizations (mostly corporations) to discover who influences who in Washington.

​It uses government records made available through the 1995 Lobby Disclosure Act to extract lobbyists’ (many of whom are part of Washington’s “revolving door” politics) links to legislators. Lobbyists are able to purchase influence through campaign contributions, and also by leveraging positions they held in government, turning social capital into access. LobbyLinks can help provide measures of the degree to which lobbyists are able to insert themselves into Washington lawmaking.

This subgraph was built by taking a central node—Tesla—plus all nodes within 3 hops of the starting node. Scroll over nodes to get a summary of the data for that node. Edges indicate that a company/organization (purple nodes) employed lobbyists with work experience in the offices of a legislator (Red/Blue nodes).​

For instance, Tesla spent $2,038,000 on lobbying from 2019 to 2021, and employed lobbyists linked to 14 legislative offices (more than Google), including Steve Scalise, Maxine Waters, and Sen. Chris Van Hollen.

​Zoom and pan to explore the network (it will take a minute or so to load). Hover over a node to get summary stats.

Energy Democracy

I actively lobby for a transition to clean renewable energy through democratization of our utilities. Here’s an article I wrote on the subject, honing in on the investor-owned utility in my hometown of Rochester, NY.