Catholic Health Ends Eight-Year Park Strategies Lobbying Relationship

Why It Matters

Catholic Health, the Long Island-based not-for-profit hospital system, ended its nearly eight-year relationship with Park Strategies LLC on January 31, 2026. The first-quarter 2026 lobbying filings show the LDA termination filing was submitted April 27, 2026, with a final payment of $5,000.

The relationship was not a small one. Since registering Catholic Health as a client in 2018, Park Strategies billed $30,000 per quarter, every quarter, accumulating roughly $905,000 in total disclosed fees across 31 regular quarterly reports before the termination. Catholic Health was paying the firm at a steady clip even as the specific issues being lobbied on shifted from CMS audit relief, to COVID-19 relief funding, to congressionally directed spending for hospital facility improvements.

Park Strategies is a boutique firm, and the loss of a long-standing client is notable against that backdrop. In the first quarter of 2026, the firm filed just five disclosures with a combined reported value of $15,000, with Orleans County, N.Y. as its largest remaining client at $10,000. The firm's all-time largest clients, including Lockheed Martin, United Technologies, and Alaska Structures, reflect a historically defense-heavy portfolio. Catholic Health, at $905,000 over eight years, represented a consistent and significant slice of the firm's health care work.

Broader Context

The core of what Park Strategies was doing for Catholic Health in its final years was chasing congressionally directed spending. From 2022 onward, the disclosed lobbying work centered on securing Community Project Funding through the annual Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriations bill, including a specific request tied to the build-out and equipping of the Yaphank medical office facility operated by Catholic Health.

That work became harder to execute as Congress repeatedly failed to pass regular appropriations bills on time. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2024 was signed into law in March 2024, and the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026 was signed on February 3, 2026, but the broader appropriations process has been persistently stalled. Congressional Research Service data cited in the source material indicates that FY2024 Community Project Funding represents the most recent enacted earmarks, with no new earmarks passed for FY2025.

For a hospital system paying $120,000 a year to lobby primarily for congressionally directed spending, a multi-year stretch without enacted earmarks raises an obvious question about the return on that investment.

The Appropriations Environment

The current federal budget environment has not been friendly to domestic discretionary spending. The Trump administration's second term has deprioritized the kind of facility-funding earmarks that Catholic Health was seeking through the Labor/HHS/Education appropriations process. Even for organizations with well-connected lobbyists, the pipeline for hospital facility earmarks has narrowed considerably.

The earlier phases of the Catholic Health lobbying engagement, including CMS audit relief in 2018 and 2019 and COVID-19 relief funding advocacy from 2020 through 2021, appear to have run their course well before the termination. The CMS audit matter dropped off the disclosed lobbying agenda entirely after 2019, suggesting it was resolved. The COVID-19 relief work concluded naturally as federal pandemic relief programs wound down.

The Bottom Line

The data available does not show Catholic Health registering a new lobbying firm following its departure from Park Strategies. Without a successor firm on record, it is not possible to assess what capabilities Catholic Health may be seeking in future federal advocacy.

What the record does show is a client that paid consistently for nearly eight years, whose primary lobbying objective in recent years, securing annual congressional earmarks for hospital facilities, became increasingly difficult to achieve as the appropriations process stalled and the political environment shifted away from domestic discretionary spending. The termination came at the end of January 2026, shortly before the Consolidated Appropriations Act for 2026 was signed into law in February, closing out a fiscal year cycle in which the broader earmark environment remained constrained.

Park Strategies, founded by former U.S. Senator Alfonse D'Amato and built around relationships with the Appropriations and Banking Committees, retains a small but active client base. With Catholic Health gone, Orleans County, N.Y., stands as its largest disclosed client in the current quarter at $10,000, a figure that underscores how much the firm's footprint has contracted from its peak years representing defense contractors and large institutional clients.

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