LIV Golf is experiencing a decline in its play within the Beltway.

This month, the Saudi-backed golf league reported $90,000 in congressional lobbying expenses in the second quarter, according to mandatory disclosure statements filed with the House and Senate. That payout — the same amount LIV Golf reported spending in Q1 — represents a significant drop from the $140,000 it spent in each fiscal quarter last year, when its contentious-turned-collaborative relationship with the PGA Tour ruffled the feathers of Washington legislators.

On June 6, 2023, rival golf companies that had initiated legal action announced that they, along with the DP World Tour, had agreed to resolve their disputes by forming a partnership in a new, for-profit entity that would combine their commercial rights. As part of the plan, the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF) agreed to invest more than $1 billion in the new venture.

Congressional condemnation came swiftly; a day after the announcement, a House bill was proposed that would end the PGA Tour’s unique ability to operate as a federally tax-exempt charity. Shortly thereafter, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI) began investigating the “unprecedented deal” and held a hearing last July that featured testimony from two PGA representatives.

But PIF, which supports LIV Golf, “refused to cooperate” with requests for documents and testimony, according to subcommittee chairman Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.).

“We can infer that this means that Saudi Arabia is seeking to reap the benefits of our freedoms while avoiding the obligations of our law,” Blumenthal said at a follow-up hearing in September. The subcommittee then expanded its focus to PIF’s broader activities in the U.S. In January, Blumenthal and Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), the ranking member, sent a letter to PIF Gov. Yasir al-Rumayyan, saying the PSI would continue its expanded investigation.

“While the subcommittee’s investigation began last summer with questions about (PIF’s) multi-billion dollar investment in USA Golf, it has grown much larger and more significant,” Blumenthal said at the February hearing. A Senate spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the current status of the investigation.

As the focus of Congress’s klieg lights shifts, it appears that LIV Golf’s K Street efforts have shifted as well.

In August 2022, LIV Golf hired Venture Government Strategies (formerly known as Hobart Hallaway & Quayle) to lobby Congress to “protect the rights of professional golfers to play whenever and wherever they want.” The effort was led by the firm’s principals, former Republican congressman Ben Quayle and onetime Democratic Senate counsel Rashid Hallaway.

At the outset of the PSI investigation, LIV Golf engaged former Washington PR firm Gitcho Goodwin, to whom it paid $55,000, according to Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) filings with the Justice Department. Other FARA disclosures by Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, the law firm and lobbying shop hired by PIF, showed a spate of LIV-related activity in the same month.

In contrast, Brownstein’s most recent FARA filing showed only one contact with LIV Golf during the six-month period from September 2023 to February 2024; a Zoom session with Senator Blumenthal earlier this year. Representatives for LIV and Brownstein did not respond to emails requesting comment.

More than a year after LIV Golf and the PGA announced their “framework agreement,” they have yet to implement it. In May, Jimmy Dunne, a PGA Tour board member credited with helping to form the alliance and who testified before the Senate last year, resigned from his seat on the tour’s policy board, complaining in a letter that “no meaningful progress has been made toward a transaction with the PIF.”