Of the 10 public companies in Altitude's money rankings, three have ever appeared in federal lobbying disclosures: Definium (active and growing fast), Atai (one year, 2022, then nothing), and Compass Pathways — which quietly started federal lobbying only in 2025, after two straight years at zero. The other seven have no federal lobbying footprint at all. The dollar amounts involved are small by K Street standards, the work runs through a handful of small DC firms, and — where we can check it against a real legislative outcome — spend and success don't obviously track each other, the same non-correlation journal/32 found between CEO pay and stock performance.
The firms
Two small firms carry nearly this entire relationship, and one company just started running its own parallel track.
Conafay Group reported $960K in total federal lobbying compensation across 12 clients in 2025 — up 140% year-over-year. Pharmaceuticals/Health Products was 77.1% of that book ($740K), and one client alone, Mind Medicine (Definium's pre-rebrand name), was $240K of it — a quarter of the entire firm's 2025 revenue. The rest of Conafay's top clients that year: Antibiotics Working Group ($200K), Revagenix ($170K), Elusys Therapeutics and ReAlta Life Sciences ($80K each), LifeScience Logistics ($70K), and smaller amounts for ACADIA Pharmaceuticals, Microbiome Therapeutics Innovation Group, Rosalind Franklin University, and Vaxxas.
KPM Group DC reported $1.15M across 9 clients in 2025, but its 2025 per-client breakdown isn't available anywhere we could find — the year selector on its OpenSecrets profile simply doesn't expose one. By 2026, KPM's compensation had dropped 64.3% year-over-year to $410K across 8 clients, and Mind Medicine/Definium is absent from that 2026 roster entirely. In 2024, KPM had fielded 2 of Definium's 5 named lobbyists; by 2025, Conafay was carrying the entire $240K Definium relationship alone. That's consistent with Definium consolidating its federal lobbying down to one firm sometime between 2024 and 2025 — though without the missing 2025 KPM breakdown, we can't say precisely when KPM's Definium line hit zero, only that it clearly had by 2026.
Client by client
| Client | Firm(s) | Year | Direct spend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Definium / Mind Medicine | Conafay (3 lobbyists) + KPM (2 lobbyists) | 2024 | $190K combined |
| Definium / Mind Medicine | Conafay only | 2025 | $240K (Conafay's share; KPM's 2025 share unknown) |
| Atai Life Sciences | KPM Group DC (3 lobbyists) | 2022 (only year) | $50K |
| Compass Pathways | Todd Strategy Group + self-filed | Q1 2025 (only quarter confirmed) | $140K combined |
| Compass Pathways | — | 2023–2024 | $0 |
| Revive Therapeutics | — | — | $0 (see note below) |
| Helus Pharma/Cybin, GH Research, Bright Minds, Entropy Neurodynamics, Optimi Health, Rhelion | — | — | $0 — no federal filing at all |
Atai's federal lobbying is confirmed as a genuine one-year push: 2022 only, $50K, 3 lobbyists at KPM Group DC, and nothing before or since — under either the pre-merger name (Atai Life Sciences) or the post-merger name (AtaiBeckley returns no OpenSecrets profile whatsoever). Revive Therapeutics resolves as a recognized OpenSecrets client entity but with no renderable filings — meaningfully different from a search returning no match at all, and the stronger evidence points to a genuine zero rather than a lookup miss.
Compass Pathways' surprise debut
This is the most interesting single finding in this piece. Compass Pathways — one of the sector's most visible names, the company behind COMP360 psilocybin — shows $0 in federal lobbying for 2023 and 2024. Then, in the first quarter of 2025, it filed two separate federal lobbying registrations simultaneously:
- An outside-firm contract with Todd Strategy Group, reporting $80,000 in income for Q1 2025
alone, with four named lobbyists — Eric Bergren, Katherine Fleming Cotton, Paul Edattel, and Nicholas Uehlecke — working the House, Senate, HHS, and OMB. The issue listed on the filing: "General education on Compass Pharmaceuticals. Mental health and PTSD."
- A separate, self-filed registration under the registrant name "Compass Pathways Inc." itself,
reporting $60,000 in Q1 2025 expenses. The named contact, Eric Rasmussen, is listed with an email on the "stateandfed.com" domain — worth flagging rather than assuming this is literally in-house staff; it may be a contracted government-affairs consultant filing under the company's own registrant name rather than an employee. This filing's stated issues are broader: "legislative and regulatory issues, including appropriations, pertaining to the use and application of psychedelic medicines."
Combined, that's $140,000 in one quarter — more than Atai spent in its entire one-year federal lobbying push. We've only confirmed Q1 2025 for both registrations; Q2 through Q4 2025 and any 2026 filings would be needed for a full-year total, and that's a natural follow-up for this tracker rather than something we're estimating here.
Separately, Compass's PAC and employee federal campaign contributions are tiny by comparison — just $2,000 total for the 2024 election cycle, 100% from individual employees, split between the DNC and a handful of Democratic House and presidential candidates. The lobbying spend and the political contributions are not the same thing, and shouldn't be read as one signal.
Did the spending work?
This is the section that would give the piece its real argument, and honestly, it's incomplete. journal/33 already scored the entire 2026 state legislative session bill-by-bill — seven laws passed, eleven bills died, two still technically alive — and the one data point we can confidently connect to this piece's lobbying figures is a miss: Kansas HB2218, the trigger-law bill Compass's state-level lobbyist Steve Kearney requested on the company's behalf, cleared committee in January 2026 but never got a floor vote before the legislature adjourned sine die on April 11. That's a separate relationship from the federal one described above — Kearney's work was at the state level — but it's the one concrete result we can point to, and it didn't convert to a law.
Compass's federal lobbying, by contrast, doesn't map to a single bill or vote at all. Its Q1 2025 filing describes "general education" at HHS and OMB on mental health and PTSD — relationship- building and regulatory framing ahead of COMP360's NDA push, not a specific ask the way Kearney's Kansas work was. That makes it harder to score as a win or a loss, because there's no single vote to check it against.
What we don't yet have: a confirmed link between any of the seven bills that did become law in 2026 — including Virginia's psilocybin trigger law, Oregon's ibogaine legalization, or any of the others — and lobbying by Conafay, KPM, Todd Strategy Group, or any client on this list. We checked what we could reach; the Issues, Bills, and Agencies tabs on each company's OpenSecrets and LD-2 filings would be the next place to look for that link, and we're flagging it as open rather than implying a connection we haven't verified. As it stands: one confirmed miss, no confirmed hit — which says more about how much reporting is still needed here than about whether lobbying works.
Part 2: the people
The firm-level and client-level view above is only half the picture. Part 2, publishing Thursday, covers the individual lobbyists named on these filings — who they are, their backgrounds, and a genuine cross-firm overlap pattern: the same small number of people show up representing a trade association, a company, and in one case a direct competitor, all within this same cluster of two firms.
This is business and policy reporting, not legal advice. Figures are drawn directly from OpenSecrets and federal LD-2 disclosures; where a figure could not be confirmed, we've said so rather than estimated one.
Sources
- OpenSecrets — Definium Therapeutics / Mind Medicine client profile, 2024 and 2025 lobbyist
rosters; Atai Life Sciences client profile, 2022 roster; Conafay Group and KPM Group DC firm profiles, client lists and compensation by year
- LDA.gov — LD-2 disclosure filings for Compass Pathways Inc. (Todd Strategy Group registration and
self-filed registration, Q1 2025)
- Altitude: journal/26 — The Psychedelic Money Rankings
- Altitude: journal/32 — CEO Pay vs. Stock Performance
- Altitude: journal/33 — 2026 Legislative Session Scored
- Altitude: Part 2 — The People Lobbying for Psychedelics in DC (publishing Thursday, Oct 1)