In the first year of the 2025-2026 election cycle, political action committees raised a staggering $4.6 billion and spent $3.4 billion, according to Federal Election Commission filings. But an unknown share of those billions never reached a single candidate, funded no advertisements, and supported no political cause. Instead, the money flowed into the pockets of operators running so-called “scam PACs” — committees that exist primarily to enrich their organizers while exploiting the patriotic impulses of small-dollar donors.
The problem is not new. But heading into what is projected to be the most expensive midterm cycle in American history, a paralyzed FEC has created what campaign finance experts describe as the most permissive environment for political fraud in a generation. The agency has lacked a quorum since April 30, 2025, when Commissioner Allen Dickerson resigned. It cannot open new investigations, approve settlements, or take enforcement action of any kind. For scam PAC operators, the cop has left the beat entirely.
The Anatomy of a Scam PAC
The mechanics are remarkably consistent. A committee registers with the FEC under a patriotic-sounding name — “Patriots for American Leadership,” “Law Enforcement for a Safer America,” “Conservative Majority Fund” — and launches aggressive fundraising campaigns by phone, mail, and social media. The appeals invoke prominent political figures, hot-button issues, and urgent language designed to open wallets. Once the money arrives, it is routed almost entirely to “fundraising expenses,” “consulting fees,” and payments to vendors that, upon closer inspection, are frequently controlled by the PAC’s own operators.
OpenSecrets identified 86 potential scam PACs in the 2022 federal election cycle alone, defined as committees that spent over $100,000 with at least half of itemized expenditures classified as fundraising costs. Of those 86 groups, 42 percent were categorized as Republican or conservative organizations, compared to 19 percent that described themselves as Democratic or liberal. Another 34 percent were unaffiliated with either party.
The conservative tilt is not coincidental. Scam PAC operators have learned that right-leaning small-dollar donors — often older Americans motivated by strong ideological convictions — respond at high rates to robocalls and direct mail featuring the names and voices of prominent Republican figures. As AARP has warned, these sham operations disproportionately target older Americans through aggressive phone and mail campaigns.
Case Studies in Donor Exploitation
The scale of individual operations can be staggering. In the 2022 cycle, the “Law Enforcement for a Safer America PAC” raised over $14 million, according to FEC filings reviewed by OpenSecrets. Approximately 87 percent of that haul went toward vague “fundraising” expenses. The PAC reported paying roughly $950,000 to a single vendor called “Action Committee Marketing LLC” for “fundraising, payment, technical & compliance services.” The emotional hook was effective: solicitations featured appeals about law enforcement officers who “kiss their children and spouses goodbye and go to work, not knowing if they will return home after their shift.”
In April 2024, the Campaign Legal Center filed FEC complaints against two PACs that used recordings of former President Trump’s voice in deceptive robocalls. “Patriots for American Leadership” had raised nearly $1.4 million but reported donating just 3 percent to federal candidates or committees. The CLC investigation found that even this tiny amount of political activity appeared to be falsified — no federal committee had ever reported receiving funds from the PAC. Instead, records indicate that $730,000 was diverted to its treasurer, Eddie Shivers, either through direct salary payments or through a vendor called “ANTT Promotions” that Shivers had set up just before creating the PAC.
The second PAC, “Campaign for a Conservative Majority,” raised nearly $480,000 using Trump’s voice in its robocalls while pledging to support his re-election. Only about 9.1 percent of its funds went to electoral causes. The top recipient of its disbursements was an LLC formed by its treasurer and assistant treasurer, William and Anna Hartford. Of the $55,000 the group reported donating to other federal committees, $12,200 appears to have never actually been received by the listed recipients, according to CLC’s cross-referencing of FEC data.
The Network Effect
Some of the most prolific scam PAC operations are not one-off schemes but interconnected networks. OpenSecrets documented a cluster of PACs linked to Scott B. Mackenzie, whose committees — including the Tea Party Majority Fund, Conservative Strikeforce, Virgin Islands GOP, and Conservative Majority Fund — spent more than $3 million combined in the 2018 cycle while directing zero dollars to political candidates. The money flowed instead to vague “administrative” and “fundraising” costs. Mackenzie was eventually sentenced to federal prison after pleading guilty to making false statements to the FEC.
He was not alone. Russell Taub was sentenced to three years in prison for using a super PAC to funnel more than $1 million toward personal expenses. Kyle Prall received a three-year sentence for raising over half a million dollars through PACs deceptively named “Feel Bern” and “Trump Victory.” Another operator, Robert Tierney, was indicted for running nine separate scam PACs simultaneously, including the “Grassroots Awareness PAC,” “Americans for Law Enforcement PAC,” and “Republican Majority Campaign PAC.”
Yet for every operator who faces criminal consequences, dozens continue to raise money unimpeded. The prosecutions represent a fraction of the problem — the FBI and Department of Justice pursue only the most egregious cases, while the FEC, the agency with primary jurisdiction over campaign finance, has historically struggled to act even when it has a quorum.
A Watchdog Without Teeth — Or Staff
The FEC’s current paralysis compounds a long-standing enforcement deficit. The agency, created as part of post-Watergate reforms, requires four of its six commissioners to take virtually any substantive action — opening investigations, issuing penalties, approving audits, or publishing regulatory guidance. With only two commissioners remaining as of October 2025, both from the same political party, the FEC exists in an unprecedented state of dysfunction.
The agency’s own Office of Inspector General, in its FY 2026 management challenges report, identified the loss of quorum and bipartisan membership as a critical threat, noting that the Commission “is no longer able to perform any of the administrative tasks” required under its governing directive. Complaints continue to be filed — staff can still process paperwork — but no enforcement action can follow.
Even before the quorum collapse, the FEC’s track record on scam PACs was dismal. In February 2025, the Commission voted to dismiss a complaint alleging that a leadership PAC spent the “overwhelming majority of its funds on operating expenses rather than on supporting candidates and causes.” The dismissal was routine. Former FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, who served on the agency for over two decades before being fired by President Trump in February 2025, has noted that the Commission regularly deadlocked along partisan lines, preventing enforcement even when evidence of fraud was clear.
“It takes four votes to issue any penalties, to start any investigations, to conclude any investigations, to start any audits, to issue any rules, to answer any questions,” Weintraub told NPR. Without that threshold, the agency “really cannot do its job.”
A January 2026 Court Ruling Highlights the Dysfunction
On January 30, 2026, a federal district court in Washington, D.C., ruled that the FEC had violated the law by failing to act on a formal rulemaking petition submitted by OpenSecrets and the Campaign Legal Center. The petition sought transparency rules for political party “special purpose” accounts — vehicles through which individual donors can now contribute upwards of $1.8 million to a single party over a two-year cycle. More than a decade after Congress changed the law, the FEC still had not issued rules.
The court found the delay “unreasonable” under the Administrative Procedure Act and retained jurisdiction to monitor the agency’s progress. But with no quorum, the FEC cannot comply even with a court order directing it to act.
The ruling underscores a broader pattern: an agency structurally incapable of keeping pace with the increasingly sophisticated methods used to separate donors from their money. The FEC proposed modest reforms in 2021 — adding a “direct candidate support” data category to committee profiles on its website — but even these cosmetic changes require commissioner votes that can no longer take place.
What Remains Unknown
The full scope of scam PAC activity in the current cycle remains difficult to quantify. FEC data for the 2025-2026 cycle is still being filed and analyzed, and watchdog organizations have not yet published updated scam PAC counts. What is clear is that the structural conditions enabling this fraud have worsened considerably. The combination of record-breaking fundraising totals, a gutted regulatory agency, and an electorate primed by intense partisan messaging creates fertile ground for exploitation.
No organization contacted for this report — neither the FEC, which could not act in an official capacity, nor the PACs named in CLC’s complaints — responded to requests for comment through publicly available contact channels.
Conservative donors who wish to verify a PAC’s legitimacy before contributing can cross-reference committees on the FEC’s public database, checking what percentage of disbursements goes to candidates versus fundraising vendors. Campaign finance experts recommend looking for PACs where at least 50 percent of spending goes directly to candidates or independent expenditures — and avoiding any committee that cannot clearly demonstrate its political activity beyond raising more money.
The donors being targeted are, overwhelmingly, people who genuinely care about the causes they are told their money will support. That their generosity is systematically exploited — while the one federal agency charged with preventing such exploitation sits dark — is a failure that transcends partisan lines.