The Foreign Influence Map

• Key findings
• 7,066 American firms have registered 17,694 foreign-principal relationships from 273 countries since the records began.
• 812 relationships are active today — the rest terminated, the residue of decades of accumulated registrations.
• The Gulf has moved to the front of the live list: Saudi Arabia (36), Qatar (32), UAE (28) — nearly 100 active relationships between them — behind only Japan (49).
• A handful of firms broker it: Mercury (17 active), BGR (14), Akin Gump (91 all-time / 44 countries), Squire Patton Boggs (141 / 77).
• FARA is a disclosure law, not a ban. Registering to represent a foreign client is legal; the law exists so the work is visible.

1. Introduction: the legal way to buy influence

A foreign government cannot vote in a U.S. election or sit in a committee hearing. What it can do — legally, and at scale — is hire an American firm to make its case: to lobby members of Congress, shape press coverage, and advise on strategy. Since 1938, the Foreign Agents Registration Act has required those firms to register with the Department of Justice and disclose who they work for, what they do, and what they are paid. The point of FARA is not to stop the influence; it is to make it visible.

That visibility is the dataset. Every registered relationship between an American “registrant” firm and a foreign “principal” — a government, a state-owned enterprise, a political party — is on the public record. This paper reads the whole ledger: how big it is, which countries buy the most representation, how the live picture differs from the historical one, and which Washington firms do the brokering.

2. Data and methodology

We use the DOJ FARA registration data as mirrored in GovGreed's fara_registrants and fara_foreign_principals tables: 7,066 registrant firms and 17,694 foreign-principal relationships tagged by country, each flagged active or terminated. We report both the all-time totals (the full accumulated record) and the active snapshot (relationships not yet terminated, 812 of them). Counts use COUNT(*) directly, since the FARA tables under-report in Postgres's row-statistics. All figures were re-derived live on June 30, 2026.

Two cautions. First, the record is deep in time — it includes long-terminated relationships, and country labels reflect the era of filing (the data still carries “USSR”), so all-time country totals are a historical accumulation, not a current ranking; for “now,” use the active snapshot. Second, FARA captures registered foreign-agent work specifically; commercial lobbying registered under the separate Lobbying Disclosure Act, and any influence that never registers at all, are out of scope. This is the disclosed foreign-agent layer, not all foreign influence.

3. The active map: the Gulf moves to the front

The most interesting thing in the data is the gap between the all-time ranking and the live one. All-time, the FARA record is led by the United States' largest trading partners and allies — Japan, Canada, Mexico, Great Britain, France — decades of routine commercial and diplomatic representation. The active snapshot tells a more current story: Japan still leads, but the next three are Gulf monarchies.

Foreign principals with an active FARA registration, by country, today. The Gulf trio (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE) holds ~96 active relationships between them. All-time, the leaders are Japan (1,176), Canada (820) and Mexico (580). Verified June 30, 2026.

The Gulf's prominence is the live signal. Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE are not major U.S. trading partners on the scale of Japan or Canada; their place near the top of the active list reflects a deliberate, sustained investment in Washington representation — the kind of soft-power spending that shows up in FARA before it shows up anywhere else.

4. The brokers

Foreign governments do not lobby Washington directly; they rent the relationships and the know-how of established American firms. A small set of them dominates. Ranked by active foreign clients, Mercury Public Affairs leads with 17, followed by BGR Government Affairs and Sonoran/Stryk Global Diplomacy at 14 each. Ranked by all-time breadth, the big law-and-lobby shops tower: Squire Patton Boggs has represented 141 foreign principals across 77 countries, and Akin Gump 91 across 44.

FARA registrant firms ranked by active foreign-principal relationships; all-time totals and distinct-country breadth shown alongside. Squire Patton Boggs and Akin Gump are full-service law/lobby shops with the deepest historical foreign books. Verified June 30, 2026.

5. Discussion: the disclosed layer of a hidden market

FARA is the one corner of the influence economy that is, by design, fully public — and even so it captures only part of the picture. Commercial lobbying flows through the separate Lobbying Disclosure Act; issue advocacy, think-tank funding, and informal access leave fainter trails. What FARA gives is a clean, checkable spine: the foreign governments willing to put their name to a registered relationship, and the American firms willing to sign for them. Read against GovGreed's domestic money-trail work — the contracts the government pays out and the rules it rewrites — FARA completes the map from the other direction: the money flowing into Washington's attention from abroad.

6. Limitations and caveats

• Disclosed foreign-agent work only. FARA covers registered representation of foreign principals; LDA-registered commercial lobbying and unregistered influence are out of scope.
• All-time ≠ now. The 17,694 relationships and 273 countries are an accumulated historical record (it still lists “USSR”). For the current picture, use the 812 active relationships.
• Country labels are as-filed. Names reflect the era and the filer; we report them verbatim and do not re-map historical states to modern ones.
• Registration is lawful. Appearing in this data is compliance with the law, not evidence of wrongdoing. FARA enforcement targets failure to register.
• Relationships, not dollars. We count registered foreign-principal relationships; FARA also carries spend figures, which are noisier and not aggregated here.

7. Conclusion

Foreign influence in Washington is not mostly secret; a large, lawful slice of it is filed, dated, and searchable at the Department of Justice. The ledger shows 7,066 American firms that have, over the decades, represented 17,694 foreign-principal relationships from nearly every country on earth — and a live snapshot in which the Gulf states have bought their way to the front, brokered by the same handful of firms that broker everyone. FARA was written to make the foreign-influence market visible. This paper just read what it made visible.

Frequently asked

References & data sources

1. FARA registrations — U.S. Department of Justice, FARA eFile, mirrored in GovGreed's fara_registrants / fara_foreign_principals.
2. Methodology — GovGreed Research: sources & methods.
3. Companion papers — Who the U.S. Government Actually Pays (GGR-WP-2026-01) · The Deregulation Supercut (GGR-WP-2026-06).
4. Image credit: Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building — APK, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Not financial advice. All data from public federal disclosures.