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No school has won more NCAA men’s basketball titles than UCLA. Now the Bruins can lay claim to another type of March Madness crown – one captured not on the hardwood, but on K Street.
As the schools compete for spots in the Final Four, OpenSecrets has released its annual K Street College Classic bracket, picking each tournament matchup based on which school spent more in federal lobbying dollars in 2025.
Including schools featured in the play-in matchups on Tuesday and Wednesday, the 68 teams in the men’s basketball field spent a combined $25.6 million last year on federal lobbying, an increase of roughly 55 percent from the $16.5 million spent in 2024. Many of the top teams in the tournament posted big-time lobbying numbers, as an increased focus on higher education by the federal government has drawn major lobbying interest from some of the largest institutions in the field.
“The universities can’t take that lying down,” Beth Leech, a political science professor at Rutgers University and an expert on lobbying in higher ed, told OpenSecrets. “They have to push back. … They have to at least try. And so they’re all bumping up their lobbying spending, those elite universities, sometimes by a lot.”
Amid fervent competition, the well-deserved champion of the K Street College Classic is UCLA, a record 11-time NCAA Tournament champion and the lone representative of the University of California system in this year’s field. In all, the University of California spent a combined $3.1 million, besting defending champions Texas and its roughly $1.6 million of lobbying expenditures, in a blowout National Championship game.
Graphic by Hien An Ngo (Click to expand the bracket.)
UCLA’s victory was aided by the specific rules of the K Street College Classic:
- Any school within a university system that does its own lobbying gets credit for that spending.
- If individual schools within a system do not lobby, and only one of the schools makes the tournament, it gets credit for the entire system’s lobbying.
- If individual schools within a system do not lobby, and multiple make the tournament, none of them get any credit for lobbying.
These rules help explain how UCLA’s victory comes on the heels of first-round loss in 2025, when the Bruins put up $0 of their own money and were joined by other University of California schools in the bracket. This year, they were able to consolidate the system’s lobbying money.
K Street bracket busters: Penn, Idaho
While the seventh-seeded Bruins pulled off a few upsets along the way to a title, they weren’t the only squad that punched above its weight in the K Street College Classic.
The No. 14 seed, the University of Pennsylvania advanced all the way to the Elite Eight behind some $1.3 million in lobbying, while No. 15 seed, Idaho, pulled off the biggest upset of the tournament by defeating No. 2 seed Houston after spending just $360,000 in 2025.
Aside from those upsets, the bracket remains remarkably chalky elsewhere. No. 1 seeds Florida and Michigan each advanced to the Final Four, with both utilizing the firm Strategic Market Innovations as part of the $1.6 million and $1.5 million they spent, respectively. No. 2 seed Purdue, meanwhile, only managed a Sweet 16 appearance despite employing 13 different lobbyists – including eight who previously worked for the federal government – as part of their $1.5 million in total lobbying expenditures. Penn boasted the deepest bench in the tournament with 35 lobbyists, 23 of which qualify as “revolvers” – elected officials, staffers and regulators who leave government service to work on K Street. That depth was crucial in Penn’s monumental first round upset of No. 3 seed Illinois, who themselves spent over $440,000 in total lobbying expenditure.
Fewer schools sit out the lobbying game
Only 13 of the schools in the field reported no lobbying expenditures, down from 16 last year and 15 in 2023. Of those, Brigham Young University (Big 12 Conference) is the only member of one of the four so-called power conferences – a label that reflects their greater perceived power and influence across college sports.
The shrinking number of schools that sat out reflects the trend of increases in lobbying activity across higher education during President Donald Trump’s second term, Leech said.
“Most people usually think that interest groups lobby because they want something, that they’re proactively going out there to get something,” she said. “That certainly happens pretty often, but what happens even more often is that they’re lobbying in reaction to something that government has done. And so that’s what’s driving this trend – things that government is doing, because government, the Trump administration, and even before the Trump administration, are doing things to universities that lead them to have to react to protect themselves.”
Among schools and systems in the field, the universities of California, North Carolina, Florida and Texas once again joined numerous other institutions in lobbying on the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions Act, also known as the DETERRENT Act. A prior version of the bill also was the subject of significant lobbying efforts two years earlier. The latest incarnation, introduced by Rep. Michael Baumgartner (R-Wash.), would require colleges and universities to report even more foreign financial contributions or risk losing access to federal financial aid. It passed the House 241-169, primarily along party lines, last March before it was referred to a Senate committee.
Other legislation that drew notable attention from lobbyists include the One Big Beautiful Bill Act – overall, the most widely lobbied measure of 2025 – and the National Defense Authorization Act. OBBBA imposes a tiered excise tax of up to 8 percent on wealthy endowments and introduces a “do no harm” earnings mandate that could make some underperforming academic programs ineligible for federal loans. The Association of American Universities identified 22 sections of the NDAA that it says carry implications for research universities, from tightened security to restrictions on foreign research collaborations.
“You can’t always defeat a bill. Maybe their first goal would be to defeat it,” Leech said. “But counting the votes and seeing who’s where, they might see that as impossible. But there’s always the possibility that you’ll be able to change the bill enough that it won’t hit you quite as hard.”
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