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Jordan: Lobbying and Influence in the United States

Jordan: Lobbying and Influence in the United States

Jordan runs a professional Washington lobbying shop to guard about $1.45 billion a year in U.S. aid. Most of it is plain, registered, and filed. Here is the record.

Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994, hosts U.S. troops, and receives substantial American aid. Its small Washington operation is largely devoted to preserving that assistance and the security relationship behind it. The filings show routine foreign representation rather than a hidden or unusually expansive campaign.

The aid agreement that shapes the lobbying

In September 2022, the United States and Jordan signed a seven-year Memorandum of Understanding pledging about $1.45 billion annually from 2023 through 2029, or roughly $10.15 billion. The State Department’s U.S.-Jordan fact sheet and the September 16, 2022 signing readout set out the terms.

Jordan is also a Major Non-NATO Ally. U.S. forces rotate through bases in the country’s south and east, near Iraq, Syria, Israel, and the West Bank. Congress must still appropriate the promised assistance, so preserving legislative support is a recurring task.

A steady, mid-sized operation

Jordan’s Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) footprint is mid-size. It sits below the Gulf states and near Egypt’s level. The OpenSecrets Jordan country page tracks the main contracts. All of them are searchable in the DOJ FARA eFile. A few firms come up over the years:

  • Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck: counsel of record for the Embassy of Jordan in recent filings.
  • Squire Patton Boggs: long-time counsel for Jordan, with a file going back years.
  • Podesta Group: on the record for Jordan before the firm closed in 2017.
  • KRL International: smaller jobs on Jordan-linked accounts across cycles.

Jordan-linked spending has generally remained in the low millions each year, well below Qatar or Saudi Arabia. The operation aims to sustain an established policy rather than build a new one.

How the aid case is made

Filed work includes congressional meetings about the aid bill, opinion pieces presenting Jordan as a stable regional partner, and responses to proposed funding holds. Recent supplemental filings in DOJ FARA eFile show those activities recurring across reporting periods.

The Congressional Research Service report RL33546 on Jordan is the best one-stop brief. It lays out the aid totals, refugee load, and security ties. It also notes that Jordan hosts a large Syrian and Palestinian refugee population. That talking point shows up often in filed lobbying notes.

No major U.S. court ruling ties this lobbying operation to criminal conduct. The available record is a long trail of disclosed work intended to keep the aid agreement intact.

Aid and lobbying in proportion

  • Jordan population: about 11 million (2024 estimate).
  • U.S. aid to Jordan under the 2022–2029 MOU: about $1.45 billion per year.
  • Per-person U.S. aid to Jordan: roughly $130 per Jordanian, per year.
  • Jordan’s direct FARA spend: low millions per year, based on OpenSecrets.
  • Ratio: U.S. aid flowing to Jordan is hundreds of times the cost of the lobby that guards it.

As with Egypt, U.S. assistance to Jordan is hundreds of times larger than Jordan’s annual lobbying expense. That ratio explains the narrow focus of the work.

What the filings justify saying

Jordan illustrates ordinary disclosed foreign lobbying: limited spending, a stable client relationship, and a clear policy objective. The record does not resemble the much larger campaigns associated with some Gulf states. Better access to the filings would make this routine work easier for the public to inspect.

OpenSecrets provides a useful overview, and DOJ FARA eFile contains the primary documents.

Sources used on this page