How to Avoid Greenwashing and Trump-Proof Your Nonprofit Advocacy

In NPQ, you will read often about nonprofits that fail to engage in advocacy out of misplaced fear of tax status consequences. That is a real problem, as multiple studies attest. However, many other nonprofits do engage in lobbying activity. According to OpenSecrets.org, in 2024, 522 nonprofits hired a total of 1,174 registered lobbyists, spending over $68 million to do so.

But when nonprofits do lobby, are they making sure that their advocates are aligned with their missions? Unfortunately, often not. As I learned the hard way, many seeming nonprofit champions also work for corporate interests, which may be exacerbating the very problems that their nonprofit employers are trying to address.

Twenty years ago, when I was working as an anti-tobacco lobbyist in Maryland, I was shocked to learn that a fellow anti-tobacco lobbyist who was employed by the American Lung Association, was also working for an automobile dealers association that sought to defeat stricter car emissions standards. Car emissions, like cigarettes, are carcinogenic, but when challenged about this conflict, the lobbyist (and former state senator), Larry Levitan, said that his dual allegiance “was not a problem” because the lung association was advocating indoor air rules, while cars generated emissions outdoors.

When nonprofits do lobby, are they making sure that their advocates are aligned with their missions? Unfortunately, often not.

This experience inspired me and the members of F Minus, a lobbying accountability group, to create a list of every state-level fossil fuel lobbyist in the United States and begin to tell the story of how these lobbyists’ pro–fossil fuel advocacy harms their other clients, such as local governments, schools, and environmental groups.

This spring we launched a similar list of lobbying firms who continued working for companies owned by Elon Musk even as Musk, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and the Trump administration cut funding for many of their nonprofit clients. Both lists demonstrate the need for the nonprofit community to hold lobbying firms more accountable for working as “double agents” in the climate fight and Trump’s war on the nonprofit community.

Bottom line: Be careful who you hire to support your advocacy. Here are some key steps to take to ensure you’re hiring people who are truly aligned with your organizations’ values.

Avoiding Cynicism and Getting Informed

“Politics makes strange bedfellows,” was the response I got from a reporter to whom I brought my list of Maryland’s most conflicted lobbyists in 2003, reflecting the commonness of people representing clients whose interests are clearly or seemingly in conflict. But common does not mean it’s not a problem. Rejecting this cynical attitude that corruption is just the way of the world is the first step toward making change.

The next step is to get informed. A 50-state report card from F Minus found that many states make it easy to get this information, but others make it so hard that is seems their disclosure systems were designed by lobbyists trying to conceal their activities.

If you can find out easily, do so. If you cannot, you may need to team with others to change public policy in your state.

Some of the worst state policy offenders, by the way, are Democratic or “purple” states. For instance, Massachusetts charges members of the public $200 for a list of all state lobbyists and their clients. Pennsylvania offers a free download of such a list, but do not try to download it, because the list contains all historical data for Pennsylvania lobbyists, and is so large that it may crash your computer.

Being informed and ensuring alignment matters. In Oregon, a blue state, a week before the 2024 election, an Oregon firm whose progressive clients include Portland Public Schools and Oregon Public Broadcasting signed Elon Musk’s Tesla as a client at a time when a Trump victory would severely harm these clients.

Now Trump has eliminated federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which, among other groups, used to support Oregon Public Broadcasting. Unwittingly, Oregon Public Broadcasting had bolstered its opposition. It surely wishes now that its lobbyists had been better aligned with its interests.

Advocating for Stronger Disclosure Rules

Neither Congress nor any state prohibits lobbyists from working for different clients whose interests may conflict with each other. And believe it or not, even states that prohibit lobbyists from lobbying for and against the same bill at the same time on behalf of different clients still permit this practice as long as the lobbyist lets clients know that the conflict exists.

Colorado has the strongest lobbyist disclosure system in the country. Its website makes it easy to see all positions taken by all lobbyists on all bills, and the state’s 2019 Lobbyist Transparency Act requires all lobbyists to report new positions taken on behalf of clients within 72 hours.

Even so, a study by Brown University’s Climate and Development Lab and F Minus identified dozens of instances of Colorado firms lobbying for and against the same environmental bills at the same time.

“Law firms can’t do that,” Richard Painter, former chief ethics lawyer to President George W. Bush, told DeSmog about this practice.

So, given that lobbyists are operating in a gray area, an ethical wasteland beyond what lawyers are allowed to do, it falls to nonprofit organizations to demand full disclosure of their lobbyists’ activities on behalf of their other clients.

Auditing Your Own Advocates

In 18 states, registered lobbyists are required to disclose the bills they lobby on for each of their clients. (These states are California, Colorado, Delaware, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island, Washington, Wisconsin—and Florida, where oddly bill number disclosure is required for House but not Senate bills). Of these, eight (Colorado, Iowa, Massachusetts, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin) additionally require lobbyists to disclose positions taken on each bill.

Unfortunately, audits of these disclosures reveal another slippery tactic—one used by firms that represent both fossil fuel companies and clients harmed by the climate crisis—of simply failing to disclose consistently. In Maryland, the audit found that lobbyists only complied with disclosure rules 47 percent of the time, which is how the same firm that used to employ Levitan—the pro-car, anti-tobacco lobbyist—now lobbies on behalf of three fossil fuel companies in addition to climate-friendly clients such as a nature conservancy and a state park.

Playing both sides should never have been acceptable. These days the stakes are even higher.

An audit of lobbyist disclosures in Washington state found a similar pattern. There, the firm Insight Strategic Partners was able to disclose bill numbers on which it worked for the Environmental Defense Fund, but somehow was unable to disclose any of the bills on which it worked for Chevron or its other fossil fuel clients.

The head of this same Washington state–based lobbying firm once told me that a campaign urging people to fire their lobbyists because of their work for fossil fuel companies would never succeed because no one really cares about lobbyists. But three months later, after the firm’s work for Chevron came to light, the firm lost its most prominent environmental client, a Seattle-based philanthropy.

Time for a New Approach

Playing both sides should never have been acceptable. These days the stakes are even higher.

One of the most pro-Trump firms in Washington, DC, Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, represented both Tesla and UNICEF during the first half of 2025 despite the dismantling of USAID by Elon Musk and DOGE. (Though UNICEF, to its credit, seems to have terminated its relationship with this firm as of the end of June.)

Another firm, Cassidy & Associates, represents Tesla and the Southern Environmental Law Center even as this environmental group is suing a Musk-owned company over pollution in Memphis.

A third, Invariant, represents both Musk’s SpaceX and Prince George’s County, MD, which has used the firm to lobby for funding many of the federal agencies gutted by DOGE.

Nonprofit advocacy is important. But for nonprofits to be effective in their advocacy, they need to make sure that the lobbying firms they hire are truly on their side.