Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has repeatedly claimed that she won’t accept funds from lobbyists. Campaign finance records, however, show she has received nearly 100 separate donations from registered lobbyists since taking office.
Ocasio-Cortez’s account description on X states that the congresswoman is “people-funded” and “takes no lobbyist [cash],” using a money bag emoji in place of the word “cash.” Despite her claim to the contrary, the representative has taken thousands of dollars in contributions from lobbyists since assuming office, according to federal records.
The congresswoman has an extensive record decrying the influence of money on politics. In 2018, shortly after winning office for the first time, Ocasio-Cortez criticized her party’s “refusal to reject [corporate] lobbyist money.” Since then, she has called to ban members of Congress from working as lobbyists after leaving office, rebuked fellow Democrats for their close ties to lobbyists, and accused lobbyists of working to kill legislation that would benefit the public.
While Ocasio-Cortez has harsh words for lobbyists, she has accepted donations from them every year since she first took office in 2018.
Dave Koshgarian, a lobbyist with Ernst & Young, has been Ocasio-Cortez’s most consistent donor, sending her thousands of dollars beginning in 2020. Koshgarian has represented a number of corporate clients, including Duke Energy, MetLife, General Electric, Charles Schwab, and BlackRock, according to lobbying disclosures. Other clients represented by Ocasio-Cortez’s lobbyist donors include, among others, Nike, Delta Air Lines, healthcare trade associations, and the New Venture Fund, one arm of a massive Democratic-aligned dark money network managed by the Arabella Advisors consulting firm.
Ocasio-Cortez has also been critical of the presence of dark money, funds that filter into the ideological causes without a clear original donor, in politics. She has argued that dark money groups sway the Supreme Court and unethically influence policy development.
Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that she doesn’t take donations from lobbyists isn’t new, as the representative insists on social media that she swore off lobbyist cash from the very beginning. Cortez has, however, dialed down her public criticism of the lobbying industry in recent years, not making a single post on X with the words “lobby,” “lobbyist,” or “lobbying” since September 2022.
The Washington Examiner reported in April 2023 that one of TikTok’s top lobbyists sat on the board of directors of a nonprofit group advised by Ocasio-Cortez. The congresswoman vigorously fought against proposed bans on the Chinese social media platform at the time, arguing that the United States shouldn’t ban TikTok but should instead impose blanket protections against data harvesting.
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“This is how corporate lobbying works,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote in May 2019. “Lobbyists ID bills they need to kill to keep profits high (no matter the human cost), come up w/ ‘sensible’ talking points to mask intent + say policy is ‘misguided,’ then schmooze policymakers in secret into accepting said talking points.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s office did not respond to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment.