A Florida School District’s Lobbyist Also Works for 25 Foreign Governments. A Parents’ Group Mapped Every One.
September 22, 2026
Ballard World, an interactive globe built from United States Justice Department foreign-agent filings, puts a $270,000-a-year school district contract in Lee County, Florida on the same map as Türkiye’s Ministry of National Defense, the Libyan Arab Armed Forces and the Embassy of Japan.
FORT MYERS, FL — Ballard Partners, the highest-grossing lobbying firm in Washington, has registered 25 foreign principals in 21 countries with the U.S. Department of Justice since 2017. It has also reported $303.5 million in federal lobbying income from 685 U.S. clients over the same period, fifty of them governments, universities and other public bodies. One of those public bodies is the School District of Lee County, Florida, which pays the firm $270,000 a year.
Parents for Transparency, a nonpartisan, reader-funded project run by Lee County parents, has published Ballard World: an interactive globe on which every one of those clients is a file. Each country file carries the signed agreement filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the fee at signing, the contract’s own description of the work, the context and the press coverage. Each U.S. state file lists the firm’s clients headquartered there, public bodies first, with the income the firm reported to Congress.
What the foreign filings show
| Foreign principal | Registered | Fee at signing (the contract’s words) |
|---|---|---|
| Ministry of National Defense, Republic of Türkiye | August 21, 2026 · active | $200,000 a month, the largest monthly fee in the firm’s foreign file |
| General Command of the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (Khalifa Haftar) | March 13, 2026 · active | $2,000,000 in one installment, due on signature; the only lump sum in the file |
| Halkbank (Türkiye Halk Bankası) | August 28, 2017 · ended October 16, 2019 | $125,000 a month, cut to $40,000 in July 2019. The firm ended the engagement the day after the U.S. indicted the bank. The Justice Department dismissed the case under a deferred prosecution agreement in March 2026. |
| Republic of Turkey | May 19, 2017 · ended November 15, 2018 | $125,000 a month, cut to $62,500 in June 2018 |
| Embassy of the State of Qatar | April 2, 2018 · ended December 3, 2020 | $50,000 a month; the agreement bars the firm from representing any other Middle East sovereign for the term and one year after |
| Embassy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia | April 4, 2025 · ended September 30, 2026* | $60,000 a month; signed 74 days after the January 20, 2025 inauguration |
| Taqadum Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Iraq | April 2025 | $75,000 a month each; no Iraqi government body appears in the file |
| Republic of Liberia | May 29, 2026 · active | $100,000 a month |
| Ministry of Communication and Medias, Democratic Republic of the Congo | March 18, 2022 · active | $75,000 a month; $100,000 a month from January 27, 2025 |
| Government of Guatemala | January 13, 2022 · ended February 15, 2024 | $75,000 a month, with Taiwan, not Guatemala, responsible for paying the fee in the contract’s own words |
| Embassy of Japan | April 14, 2023 · active | $25,000 a month |
| Government of the Dominican Republic | April 5, 2017 · ended November 1, 2020 | US$900,000; the firm’s first foreign principal, registered the day its FARA registration opened |
The remaining files, Albania, Azerbaijan, Kosovo, Liberia’s 2022 engagement, the Maldives, Mali, Nigeria, the Republic of the Congo, Sudan, Taiwan, Uzbekistan and Zimbabwe, are on the globe with the same fields.
The registration clock
The firm’s FARA registration opened on April 5, 2017, 75 days after President Trump’s first inauguration. It was terminated on February 6, 2021, 17 days after he left office, and reopened on January 13, 2022. Eight new foreign principals have registered since January 20, 2025. The firm’s reported federal lobbying income rose from $19.8 million in 2024 to $91.7 million in 2025, and it reported $64.0 million in the first half of 2026 alone. Trade press that tracks the industry recorded 2025 as the largest annual revenue any lobbying firm has ever reported.
Brian Ballard, the firm’s founder, was Donald Trump’s 2016 Florida finance chair, a Trump elector and vice chairman of the Presidential Inaugural Committee; he gave $250,000 to the Trump 47 Committee on March 27, 2024. Pam Bondi joined the firm as a partner in 2019 and served as United States Attorney General from February 5, 2025 to April 2, 2026. Susie Wiles, a former Ballard partner, is White House chief of staff.
The Lee County file
On March 6, 2023, Dane Eagle, the firm’s Fort Myers managing partner and Florida’s former Secretary of Economic Opportunity, signed a FARA short-form naming the Embassy of Japan as his foreign principal. On the same day, Lee Health, the public hospital system for Lee County, registered him as its Florida lobbyist. The Lee County school board hired the firm for federal lobbying in March 2025 at $180,000 a year and for state lobbying in September 2025 at $90,000 a year. On the state contract the firm quoted the highest price of the bidders and won on a scored evaluation. The state agreement’s conflict clause bars the firm’s Fort Myers office from the work and then exempts Dane Eagle by name. The full record is published separately as The Eagle Board.
The AI layer
Ballard World also maps a second network from the same filings. Anthropic, PBC registered the firm on April 10, 2026 for “advocacy regarding DOW procurement” and paid $510,000 in the first two quarters of 2026, in the months after the Department of War designated the company a supply chain risk. Amazon.com, Inc. has been a Ballard client every quarter since 2017, $2,520,000 in all, and is Anthropic’s largest investor and landlord: its Project Rainier campus at New Carlisle, Indiana was built to train Anthropic’s models. The globe marks the five sites where those models are trained and, from state lobbying registries in Indiana, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, Texas and New York, who Amazon, Anthropic, Fluidstack and the power companies hire in each statehouse. Ballard Partners is registered in none of those five states.
What the map does not say
Everything on Ballard World is what the firm disclosed to the Justice Department and to Congress because the law requires it. Registration is compliance, not wrongdoing. Fees are contract rates at signing, not receipts; receipts are reported separately in six-month supplemental statements and are not tallied here. No filing connects any foreign principal to any Lee County contract. Press coverage on each file opens on the outlet’s own page, and Parents for Transparency does not vouch for outside reporting.
Access
Ballard World is built for phones and desktops: pinch or scroll to zoom, drag to spin, tap any country or state to open its file, and light a single network to see everything it touches. It is available to Parents for Transparency members now, with press access on request. The underlying data, the Justice Department’s FARA bulk files and every Exhibit AB, the Senate Lobbying Disclosure Act filings for registrant 401104288, and the five state registries, are public and are cited on every file.
Parents for Transparency is a nonpartisan, reader-funded project run by Lee County, Florida parents. It publishes what families, teachers and students are seeing inside the School District of Lee County, checked against the public record. It takes no candidate, party or district money, endorses no one, and applies the same treatment to claims from every side. Every figure in this release is drawn from a filed public record.
*Updated October 21, 2026. The firm reported the end of the Saudi Embassy engagement, effective September 30, 2026, in a filing dated October 9, 2026. The $303.5 million figure sums the income on every report the firm filed through June 2026; counting only the latest report for each client and quarter, which leaves out amended and restated reports, gives $295.6 million. With the third-quarter reports filed October 20, 2026, the firm has reported $339.4 million from 727 clients.
Media contact: Amber Cebull, co-founder, Parents for Transparency, info@parentsfortransparency.com. Press access to Ballard World, the FARA and LDA exports and the country-by-country contract PDFs are available to any newsroom on request.