Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm run by Brian Ballard with close ties to the Trump administration, has had a very good run over the last few years. A new CBS News investigation shows that the firm reported more than $88 million in lobbying revenue in 2025—a record since the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) took effect in 1996—and more than $98 million through three quarters of 2026. The CBS story notes that a former Health and Human Services aide claims Ballard Partners “controlled” White House policy, a claim Ballard and President Trump’s outgoing chief of staff, Susie Wiles (a former managing partner at the lobbying firm), deny. Others can weigh in on the infighting. But the more interesting story is Ballard’s public filings and tariffs. 

The LDA requires lobbying firms to report each client’s quarterly fees and the issues they lobbied on. Taking Ballard’s total income as reported on the quarterly disclosures for each client for whom it lobbied on trade and/​or tariff issues and then using LegiStorm’s methodology for allocating a lobbying firm’s total income across issue areas yields that Ballard has earned $18.5 million from lobbying on trade and tariff issues between 2025 and the third quarter of 2026 (Table 1). 

Trade and tariff issues, moreover, account for only about a tenth of Ballard’s income, but they are growing far faster than the firm as a whole. Ballard’s estimated trade and tariff-related revenue saw a more than tenfold increase between 2024 and 2025, while the firm’s total revenue saw a roughly 3.5‑fold increase over the same period. The number of clients who retained Ballard’s services for trade- and tariff-related lobbying increased from 10 to 44, and, as mentioned above, 2026 data show the numbers are running ahead. Through three quarters of 2026, the firm has nearly matched its estimated tariff/trade-lobbying revenue for all of 2025—even though the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) in February. Unsurprisingly, some of the client-specific filings for 2026 note lobbying activity related to Section 232, Section 338, and Section 301 tariffs, as well as other issues that gained momentum this year, such as United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) negotiations.

Tariffs Feed the Swamp

Tariffs are taxes, but despite the Constitution firmly grounding this power in Congress, the rate, coverage, and exceptions are largely set at the executive branch’s discretion, often product by product. When major relief from import taxes turns on the decision of the administration or the president himself, lobbying firms with well-established connections to high-ranking officials prosper. And no one has profited more handsomely than Ballard. 

In February 2025, the Trump administration terminated the Section 232 exclusion process for steel and aluminum, which at least ran on published rules, and replaced it with a highly discretionary “inclusions” process for domestic producers seeking to widen tariffs. This process ran until April 2026, when the president terminated it and authorized the Secretary of Commerce and the US Trade Representative (USTR) to jointly determine additional expansions to the scope of “national security” tariffs on these metals and copper. The Section 232 tariff action on imported pharmaceuticals, also announced in April 2026, set a 100 percent rate on patented drugs but provided for lowering it to zero for companies that have signed—or are negotiating—pricing and onshoring agreements with the Departments of Commerce and Health and Human Services (HHS). Meanwhile, the USTR imposed Section 301 “forced labor” tariffs on 60 economies earlier this year but granted several hundred pages of exemptions and no process for importers to request exclusions. 

This system naturally favors large companies that can afford to retain expensive lobbyists with close ties to the Trump administration. After the administration targeted Brazil with 50 percent tariffs, Taurus Holdings, the American subsidiary of a Brazilian arms manufacturer, turned to Ballard Partners to secure exemptions for its imports from that country, as reported by Bloomberg. According to ProPublica, Coca-Cola bottler Reyes Holdings hired Ballard in late 2024 to lobby on tariff issues. When the president announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025, PET resin, the plastic used in bottles, got exempted from the duties without a published justification, to the surprise of even the PET resin industry itself.

Tim Carney reported that after the Italian tiremaker Pirelli had its stock downgraded by Bernstein due to worries over tariffs, Pirelli hired Ballard to lobby for them on trade issues. Come March 2025, the president exempted USMCA-compliant auto parts—including those produced in Pirelli’s Mexican plants—from his IEEPA “fentanyl” tariffs, and Bernstein reversed their downgrade. Whether Ballard’s lobbying directly influenced these favorable outcomes is impossible to establish with certainty—the opaque and discretionary nature of the process for determining the scope of tariffs and granting exceptions is itself part of the problem. And it is fueling a spike in tariff-related lobbying that goes beyond Ballard: In a January 2026 report for the Washington Examiner, Carney noted that more than 800 companies retained lobbyists to work on tariff and trade issues in 2025, about twice the previous record-high amount in 2019.

Reform 

In 2016, then-candidate Trump routinely promised to “drain the swamp.” The administration’s tariff policies are filling it ever higher. A rules-based exclusion process would help somewhat, but the problem is the discretion itself. The Supreme Court’s IEEPA decision closed one tariff avenue, but the administration opened more with its additional tariffs. Congress delegated substantial discretionary authority to the executive branch, but it can also begin to claw back some authority by requiring explicit approval for tariffs proposed by the White House. Until then, well-connected firms like Ballard will play an outsized role in shaping major tariff decisions.