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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 is a close U.S. partner. It signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. It hosts U.S. troops. It takes in a big share of U.S. foreign aid each year. To guard that aid line, Jordan runs a small, steady lobbying shop in Washington. Most of it is plain, filed, and legal. Here is what the public record shows.

Why this page matters now

The aid story is the big story. In September 2022, the United States and Jordan signed a new seven-year Memorandum of Understanding. It pledged about $1.45 billion per year from 2023 through 2029. That is roughly $10.15 billion over seven years. The State Department’s U.S.–Jordan fact sheet and the September 16, 2022 signing readout both lay out the terms.

Jordan is also a Major Non-NATO Ally. U.S. forces rotate through bases in southern and eastern Jordan. The country sits next to Iraq, Syria, Israel, and the West Bank. That is the setting. A sitting Congress has to renew the aid line each year. That is the job the lobby guards.

What the FARA record shows

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.

The dollar totals are steady, not showy. Yearly Jordan-linked spend has run in the low millions. That is small next to Qatar or Saudi Arabia. The plan is not to buy new policy. The plan is to keep an old policy alive.

The aid-protection playbook

Jordan’s lobby work looks narrow on purpose. Firms set up Hill meetings on the aid bill. They pitch op-eds that frame Jordan as a stable buffer state. They push back when a member of Congress floats a hold on funds. That is it. A look through recent FARA supplementals on DOJ FARA eFile shows the same beats each cycle.

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.

The page is not a scandal page. There is no big U.S. court ruling that ties Jordan’s lobby to a crime. What there is, instead, is a long paper trail of legal work aimed at one goal: keep the aid line whole.

Scale, in plain numbers

  • 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.

Like Egypt, the money flow is the opposite of the Gulf story. The U.S. sends Jordan money. Jordan sends a small check to K Street to help keep that money flowing.

The right takeaway

Jordan’s Washington work is a good test case for what routine foreign lobbying looks like. It is filed. It is small. It aims at one aid line. Readers who only hear the word “lobbying” may picture a Qatar-scale push. That is not what Jordan does. What Jordan does is the normal part of FARA. The fix, if there is one, is better public access to the filings. Not a new law.

For readers checking our work, the best entry points are OpenSecrets and the DOJ FARA eFile.

Sources used on this page