For months, Kevin Sharer denied his beseiged biotech faced a crisis. But he knew better, didn’t he? At the same time the Amgen ceo was stubbornly fending off critics, Amgen was spending millions of dollars in the nation’s capital, trying to influence anyone who would listen to its sorry tale of reduced reimbursement.

In fact, Amgen recently doubled the amount it spends annually on lobbyists to $10.2 million and has handed out scores of political contributions, The Los Angeles Times reports. This summer, Amgen held a fundraiser at its Ventura County headquarters for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democrat from San Francisco.

Amgen now has more than two dozen politically connected lobbyists and consultants on the payroll, the paper writes. They include recently departed top Pelosi staffer George Crawford, former Clinton White House Chief of Staff Tony Podesta and a former GOP staffer for the House Ways and Means Committee who was a principal architect of the Medicare drug benefit program.

Amgen’s invigorated political effort has catapulted it into second place behind Pfizer, the world’s largest drug maker, on the list of the pharmaceutical industry’s biggest contributors to federal candidates and parties, the Times notes. Amgen was in 12th place five years ago, according to federal disclosure reports.

“They’ve certainly hired everyone they can get their hands on,” says Congressman Pete Stark, a Democrat from Fremont, Calif., who has criticized what he says has been vast over-prescribing of Amgen’s anemia medications across the country.

Of course, all this lobbying, so far, hasn’t paid off. Meanwhile, Amgen is cutting its workforce by 14 percent, or up to 2,600 jobs; closing facilities; scaling back research and telling Wall Street to expect fewer earnings. No word from Amgen’s board, though, whether Sharer’s bonus will be affected. Last year, his total compensation was $34 million.

Key Amgen reps met last week with top aides to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt to personally seek his help with Amgen’s appeal of an Aug. 1 decision that would severally restrict Medicare payments for two of Amgen’s top-selling anemia drugs. Leavitt’s department oversees Medicare.

Leavitt will not get involved in the appeal, however, because his office has concluded that Medicare’s decision was based on broad research and strongly backed by agency scientists, according to a person familiar with the matter. Amgen’s Epogen and Aranesp treat anemia in nearly a million cancer and dialysis patients, and they contributed to nearly half of Amgen’s $14.3 billion in revenue last year. The medicines remain Medicare’s single biggest medication expense.

Amgen faces several big political and regulatory challenges. Under new spartan guidelines, Medicare wants to sharply reduce the dosages of Amgen’s anemia drugs it pays for. And next month, an FDA advisory committee will meet to consider further restrictions to the drugs’ labels beyond new ones added last spring.

Another challenge is a move by several members of Congress, including Stark, to make generic substitutes to biotech drugs available. Such a law could make biotech drugs much less profitable for companies like Amgen. “The American taxpayer funds a lot of Amgen’s bottom line, and they should be able to make sure they aren’t wasting their money,” Stark says.

As Amgen’s courting of Pelosi and other Democratic lawmakers indicates, it is adjusting to new political realities after years of associating mostly with Republicans, who until recently controlled both Congress and the White House. Amgen’s lobbying roster is now nearly evenly split among firms associated with both major parties and its share of political donations to Democrats has nearly doubled to 37 percent last year from 21 percent in 2002, according to an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Gail Wilensky, a former Medicare chief in the early 1990s, said it was too soon to tell how much Amgen’s efforts and wallet were going to pay off in Washington - at least in the short term.

The likelihood that the company would succeed in overturning the recent Medicare decision, for instance, is slim, she says. Although it has happened in some instances over the years, she adds, it was unlikely in the instance of the anemia treatments, especially in light of the FDA’s recent changes to the drugs’ labels. “They appear to have gone through much of the process at this point,” she says.

Meanwhile, the company continued its efforts to inform employees about the layoffs announced Wednesday and to ease anxieties where possible. Amgen employees received a video Thursday morning detailing outlines of the company’s restructuring plan. There still has been no announcement spelling out where the cuts would occur or how many of the 8,600 employees at its Thousand Oaks headquarters would be affected.