Introduction: What Is Appropriations, and Why Lobby on It?

Lobbying lawmakers in the appropriations process is an effective way for nonprofit advocates to influence public policy. The appropriations process gives advocates an opportunity to persuade Congress to provide federal funding for their policy priorities and to block funding for programs they oppose. It also gives them a chance to achieve their goals by asking lawmakers to establish new policy programs or to make changes to existing programs. And advocates can call on Congress to include limits in appropriations bills on how executive-branch officials use federal funding to implement policies. For these reasons, it is important that advocates seeking to shape public policy understand how the appropriations process works and the different ways they can influence it.

Understanding the appropriations process is important because lobbying lawmakers as it unfolds offers advocates a more reliable way to achieve their policy goals. Congress considers appropriations bills every year, and they almost always become law. The regularity of the appropriations process gives advocates a predictable and recurring opportunity to secure major wins and to make incremental progress towards achieving their goals by building on past efforts to accomplish significant policy change over time. In contrast, Congress considers non-appropriations bills sporadically, and lawmakers have a hard time passing them consistently in the current environment.

Lobbying lawmakers in the appropriations process is also a manageable endeavor for advocates. The number of lawmakers and congressional staffers whom advocates must persuade to be successful in that process is relatively small. This is because most of the decisions in the appropriations process are made by lawmakers in just two committees—the House and Senate appropriations committees. In contrast, advocates must persuade far more lawmakers—and staffers—to successfully influence non-appropriations bills because major decisions affecting those bills are made by lawmakers across 19 committees in the House and 15 committees in the Senate. In both cases, there is a centralization of more decision-making in leadership today than in past years.

Advocates can improve their ability to lobby lawmakers in the appropriations process by understanding how it works in practice. That process has admittedly changed in recent decades. And the pace of that change has accelerated during the Trump administration. But the fundamentals of the appropriations process—its who, what, when, where, and why—have not changed. Learning where and when the appropriations process happens, who is involved, what they are trying to do, and how they plan to do it empowers advocates to recognize the inflection points in that process when lawmakers and staff make major decisions. Knowledge of the fundamentals of the appropriations process also gives advocates the ability to identify the key players making major decisions in that process and tailor their policy requests to better appeal to them.

This guide prepares advocates to lobby lawmakers in the appropriations process successfully. To that end, it first gives advocates a straightforward explanation of that process and how it relates to federal budgeting more generally. The guide next provides an overview of the appropriations process featuring a quick-reference timeline depicting its most important stages, from the president submitting his proposed budget to Congress, to Congress sending final appropriations bills to the president to be signed into law. The guide then reviews the general rules and practices regulating the appropriations process in the House and Senate, as well as how they limit what advocates can achieve in that process.

This guide is organized to help advocates learn how to recognize the inflection points in the appropriations process when its most important decisions are made, locate where those decisions are made, and identify the key players who are making them. The guide also provides advocates with general engagement strategies and best practices to advance their policy priorities in the appropriations process.