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I theorize that ex parte communications during agency rule development open a pathway for organized interests to lobby agency officials. Using multi-level modeling techniques, I test this argument with data derived from content analysis of government documents and a telephone survey of 133 interested parties, who were active during rule development. I find that ex parte communications between interested parties and agency officials influence the content of regulatory policy outputs. Moreover, this result holds despite controlling for formal influence methods and other rival contextual and political explanations. I then demonstrate that certain types of interested parties are more likely to be ex parte participants, which suggests a bias towards resource-rich interests during agency lobbying. I conclude that political battles are often fought, and won, by organized interests during a stage of the American policymaking process that scholars have often over-looked: agency rule development. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]