Netflix Doubles D.C. Lobbying Spend; Paramount Paid Trumpworld Firm
I tell you how much every studio and union is coughing up as Hollywood floods Washington with cash — and calls in the fixers
Dave Levinthal is an investigative journalist in D.C. Dave led Raw Story's newsroom as editor-in-chief and was a deputy editor at Business Insider. He also worked as an editor or reporter at the Center for Public Integrity, Politico and OpenSecrets.
As spring turned to summer, Hollywood interests kept colliding with Trump administration priorities: tariffs, intellectual property, the “big, beautiful bill.”
Enter lobbyists, Washington’s political fixers and magic workers — for a price.
Entertainment companies and associations together spent millions of dollars during the second quarter of 2025 to press, placate and otherwise communicate with Congress, the White House and federal agencies, according to an analysis by The Ankler of newly released federal lobbying records.
Several leading players, including Netflix and Paramount, spent significantly more lobbying money than they ever have in any previous year’s second quarter. Paramount had at stake not only the same issues that affect the entire industry — AI, IP protections, etc. — but also its own future as a company, with its owner, Shari Redstone (via holding company National Amusements) awaiting approval of her sale of the company to David Ellison’s Skydance. News last week that CBS was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert added fuel to the fire of suspicion in Hollywood — and beyond — that Ellison and others involved in the transaction were capitulating to the desires of President Donald Trump in order to grease the wheels of the deal.
It’s not just Paramount. After four years under President Joe Biden, whose politics are broadly aligned with those of most entertainment stakeholders but whose administration slowed M&A in the industry, Hollywood now faces a complex new variable: an emboldened and entertainment-attuned Trump — a World Wrestling Entertainment Hall of Fame member, one of two presidents with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a recipient of separate pensions from the Screen Actors Guild and American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (from the days before the two unions merged).
Entertainment industry powerhouses — Netflix, Paramount, Walt Disney Co. and the Motion Picture Association, along with tech giants Apple, Amazon and Google — met the moment by leaning heavily this spring and summer on the services of for-hire lobbying firms.
Particularly popular with Hollywood: Ballard Partners, the Trump-tied firm that in a decade has launched itself from a relatively small, Florida-focused operation to a national behemoth. Ballard has at once provided clients prime inroads to Trumpworld while sometimes angering Trump with its brashness. (Ballard and the White House are reportedly back on solid ground.)
Counting Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles among its alumni, Ballard Partners ranked No. 1 in revenue generation ($20.6 million) among all federal-level lobbying firms in the nation during the second quarter of 2025, according to an analysis by Politico. During the same period last year, the firm earned just a fraction of that — $4.4 million.
Patrick Kilcur — until late last year the executive vice president of U.S. government affairs for the Motion Picture Association — joined Ballard in December as an entertainment industry-focused partner based in the firm’s D.C. office. Ballard also maintains California outposts in L.A. and Sacramento.
Below, I’ll tell you how Kilcur’s move is reshaping Hollywood’s access to Trumpworld — and what it means for the next phase of the Paramount-Skydance merger, Netflix’s inside game in Washington, and exactly what every major studio, including Disney, spent as they try to stay ahead on AI, regulation and plain survival.
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