How the firm works
Apollo Counsel is a deliberately small federal government relations practice: one senior counselor, a limited client list, and a working style built on legal discipline. Clients hire the person they met — there is no hand-off, no B-team, and no account manager between you and the work.
Trained as a lawyer, practicing advocacy
The raw material of federal advocacy is legal material: statutory text, legislative history, committee procedure, the administrative record. Apollo Counsel’s principal trained and practiced as a lawyer before two decades in and around Congress. That discipline shows up in the work — arguments built on the text, requests drafted so staff can act on them, and advice that distinguishes what is true from what is merely said.
A deliberately small client list
The firm takes fewer clients than it could. That is a feature: conflicts stay clean, attention stays undivided, and every client gets the principal — not a team assembled after the engagement letter is signed.
Government affairs is relationship work, and relationships are not delegable.
Where the time goes
A lobbyist’s value is built in the hours spent on the Hill — in hallways, in staff offices, at the edges of hearings — and those hours compete with everything else on a calendar. A one-person practice with a limited client list has fewer competing demands: no internal management, no firm bureaucracy, no roster of accounts each needing its own standing call. The time goes where it earns something, and a client who needs an answer today gets one today.
Modern infrastructure, standing watch
The firm maintains a continuous watch across the floor schedules, committees, and agency dockets that touch client interests, powered by a custom-built, proprietary AI monitoring system. Every signal is read and filtered by counsel before it reaches a client. How the watch works →
Conflicts and confidentiality
Conflicts are checked before every engagement and disclosed plainly. Client work is confidential, period — the firm does not publicize client names or matters, and public disclosure happens only where the Lobbying Disclosure Act requires it.
Connecting you to Washington
Engagements can take several forms, but building strong relationships with policymakers is at the heart of each of them.
Legislative Strategy
When you need the legislative process to work. Whether it’s passing a bill, working with a committee, supporting a regulatory strategy or engaging Members of Congress, executing the right strategy leads to successful outcomes.
Appropriations
When the policy is through funding. Funding requests prepared properly and worked through both chambers’ subcommittees, on the calendar the process actually runs on.
Oversight Response
When a committee has written to you. The response is both legal and political, and counsel experience on the receiving end of the process informs every reply.
Monitoring & Intelligence
When the point is knowing early. A standing watch on the floor schedule, committees and dockets that touch your interests — filtered by counsel, not keyword alerts.
The First Call
When you aren’t sure which of these you need. That conversation is free, candid, and short. If the right answer is a bigger firm or no firm at all, you’ll hear that too.
Where the firm works
Technology & TelecommunicationsEnergy & Commerce · Senate Commerce · FCC
Spectrum, broadband, privacy, content moderation, competition and export controls each sit with a different set of members and a different agency — Energy and Commerce, Senate Commerce, both Judiciary Committees, the FCC, NTIA and the FTC.
What this has looked like: Representations of large technology companies, software developers, device manufacturers, telecommunications companies and their trade associations, content producers and broadcasters.
Selected matters
- Served as the cable industry’s connection to the chairman of the Senate Commerce telecommunications subcommittee — carrying the industry’s position to the gavel, and the subcommittee’s thinking back.
- Led the outside consulting effort for a global technology platform through the Energy and Commerce Committee’s work on federal privacy legislation and platform marketplace rules.
Recent Insights
HealthWays & Means · Finance · CMS
Federal health policy is mostly payment policy: for most organizations the thing that matters is not a statute but a reimbursement rule, a coverage determination or a payment model, moving on CMS’s calendar while Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, Finance and HELP supply the pressure and the occasional statutory fix.
What this has looked like: Representations of pharmaceutical manufacturers, innovative biotech companies, medical providers, patient groups.
Selected matters
- Built the bipartisan support behind Orphan Cures legislation and held it together until the provision was folded into the reconciliation package that enacted it — a drug pricing fix that actually became law.
- Ran point on the Senate campaign on copay accumulator reform, the question of whether a manufacturer’s assistance counts toward a patient’s deductible.
- Identified and recruited the champions for Medicare secondary payer reform — found the Members willing to put their name on a technical yet vital fix, and got them to carry it.
- Connected patient advocacy organizations with the Members who represent them, so the case for a policy arrived from a constituent.
- Secured the support of key committee members and footprint members who represent large lab facilities for diagnostic laboratory payment reform.
Recent Insights
Energy & EnvironmentENR · EPW · FERC · EPA
Energy and environment belong together because the same project triggers both — a transmission line, a data center, a pipeline or a plant runs into siting, permitting and water rules at FERC, EPA and the Army Corps at the same moment it runs into energy markets, interconnection and tax credits.
What this has looked like: Representations of traditional energy producers and exporters, renewable energy providers, transmission builders, technology companies.
Selected matters
- Led Democratic outreach for a coalition of independent producers on crude oil export reform: the harder half of that coalition to build, and the half that decided it.
- Stood watch over the legislation supporting vehicles powered by renewable energy, so clients knew what was moving before it moved.
- Put biofuels producers in front of Members of Congress in support of creating a tax credit for renewable aviation fuel.
Recent Insights
AgricultureAgriculture Committees · USDA
Federal agriculture policy runs on a five-year farm bill that sets commodity programs, crop insurance, conservation and SNAP together, which means the coalition that passes it — rural members who need the farm title, urban members who need SNAP — has to be rebuilt from scratch every reauthorization, with USDA’s rulemakings following behind.
What this has looked like: Representations of commodity and food producers, animal health biotechs.
Selected matters
- Secured support for legislation reforming the FDA review processes that govern animal feed — the bottleneck between a proven feed additive and the animals it was meant for.
- Built awareness on the Hill of the northward march of New World screwworm and other emerging pests, ahead of the committees’ own attention.
- Briefed Members on the global impacts and supply chain pressures facing a multinational food producer — how a decision taken in Washington lands on a supply line that crosses a dozen borders.
Recent Insights
- SNAP out of it: the traditional Farm Bill coalition isn’t coming back togetherSEPTEMBER 8, 2026
- September OutlookSEPTEMBER 1, 2026
Financial ServicesFinancial Services · Senate Banking · CFTC
Financial services falls under the jurisdiction of several distinct committees: the banking regulators answer to Financial Services and Senate Banking, the securities regulators to another set of rooms, and derivatives — despite having nothing to do with farming — run through the Agriculture Committees, because that is where commodity futures started.
What this has looked like: Representations of major banking companies, fintech startups.
Selected matters
- Monitored the development of bipartisan privacy legislation for clients whose exposure turned on definitions still being drafted.
Recent Insights
TransportationT&I · Senate Commerce · DOT
Transportation moves on a reauthorization clock — surface, aviation and rail programs each expire on their own schedule, and when a bill opens, everything touching that mode is briefly in play before Transportation and Infrastructure, Senate Commerce, EPW and the DOT modal administrations close it again for years.
What this has looked like: Representations of technology and logistics companies, airlines.
Selected matters
- Built bipartisan support among Members for extending the tax credit for renewable jet fuel — the aviation side of a fight the fuel producers were running from the other end.
Recent Insights
- September OutlookSEPTEMBER 1, 2026
Tax & TradeWays & Means · Finance · USTR
Granted expressly to Congress by the Constitution, the powers to tax and to impose tariffs are under the authority of the House Ways and Means and Senate Finance Committees. The same members who write the tax code decide whether a credit is part of a reconciliation bill or whether to constrain executive trade action.
What this has looked like: Representations of major Fortune 500 companies.
Selected matters
- Built bipartisan support for extending expiring corporate tax provisions: the recurring, unglamorous work of keeping a provision alive through a Congress with no appetite for a tax bill.
- Secured support for tax credits sustaining local journalism and local broadcasters.
- Ran administration outreach for biopharmaceutical manufacturers when pandemic-era supply line restrictions cut them off from the ingredients their products required.
Recent Insights
- Northern Exposure: the looming Canada Tariff StandoffAUGUST 27, 2026
AppropriationsAppropriations Committees · OMB
Appropriations touches every issue area when policy priorities are reflected by funding levels. One of the only guaranteed legislative vehicles is the annual funding process — authored by twelve subcommittees per chamber, with report language that carries a great deal of direction never appearing in statute.
What this has looked like: Representations of municipal and local governments, non-profit organizations.
Selected matters
- Won appropriations for municipal redevelopment projects — the money that turns a stalled parcel into a built one.
- Secured funding for federally supported medical research.
Recent Insights
OversightHouse Oversight · HSGAC
A committee letter has an audience beyond the recipient, and the response is read as a political document as much as a legal one — the organizations that come through House Oversight, Senate Homeland Security or an authorizing committee’s inquiry well are the ones that understood, early, what the committee actually wanted.
Selected matters
- Built and strengthened the relationships between Fortune 500 chief executives and the Members and Senators who would one day have questions for them — before the questions arrived.
- Watched the oversight committees for what they were lining up next, and told clients when their industry entered the frame.
- Built the response strategy for congressional oversight requests: what to produce, what to say, and in what order.
Recent Insights
How engagements work
Clients engage with the firm under agreements that cover a narrowly scoped project or a broader retainer, depending upon what best fits their needs. The firm’s small size and unique capabilities allow a range of bespoke arrangements that best accomplish a client’s goals.
Every client relationship starts with an initial meeting to assess the firm’s compatibility with the client and the best strategy to meet its government affairs objectives.
Questions about cost, LDA registration, or how a government relations firm differs from a law firm? Plain answers to fair questions →