Elon Musk, the richest man in the world with a net worth north of $400 billion, is now also the biggest donor in U.S. politics, having spent more than a quarter of $1 billion to elect Donald Trump president in 2024.
Musk made his biggest investment in America PAC, a super PAC that ran an extensive (but maybe not particularly effective) operation in swing states to get low-propensity Republican voters out to the polls. What made Musk’s efforts in 2024 different from those of past megadonors is that the super PAC operations he funded were directly coordinated with the Trump campaign.
Super PACs and other outside groups allowed to raise unlimited contributions are ostensibly meant to be independent from the political parties and candidates they support — at least, that was the rationale given by the Supreme Court in its 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which enabled corporations and the wealthy to make such contributions.
Since then, the courts, the FEC and opportunistic political party actors have knocked down the wall of independence between the political action committees and the campaigns that the Citizens United court had presumed.
What the country is left with is the worst of all possible worlds. The political parties are hollow and weak, especially at the state level. Members of Congress spend an inordinate amount of time fundraising, for themselves and their party. Their campaigns send out endless, often deceptive solicitations for small-dollar donations. Meanwhile, nonparty actors, fueled by billionaire donations, control what should be party activities and buy themselves an amount of power and access that was previously unheard of.
It’s time to admit an uncomfortable fact: 15 years after Citizens United, campaign finance reform is dead.
This doesn’t mean that efforts to regulate money in politics no longer exist or have no future. What it does mean is that existing campaign finance laws no longer serve their stated purpose of preventing corruption and empowering the voices of ordinary citizens. Those still on the books also face an uncertain future in the face of a deeply hostile judiciary that will only get more hostile as Trump appoints even more conservative judges to the federal bench.
Campaign finance reform traces its roots to the turn of the 20th century. The enactment of civil service reform ended the old spoils system, whereby federal office-seekers and officeholders made small donations or paid a portion of their government salaries to fund their respective parties. The current system of campaign financing slowly emerged, with corporations and the very wealthy financing party efforts, until it came into full blossom under the guidance of Mark Hanna, William McKinley’s campaign manager, in the 1896 presidential election.
McKinley’s campaign was the first entirely funded outside of the political system, as Hanna raised millions from nearly every major corporation in New York City. Never before had a campaign raised so much money and from so many powerful interests, from J.P. Morgan to John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, as it beat back the populist campaign of McKinley’s opponent William Jennings Bryan that threatened the power of capital. Reform efforts sprang forth to address popular fears of corruption from giant corporate monopolies and the growing ranks of the industrial oligarchy.
First came the Tillman Act of 1907, a law banning corporate donations to political parties and candidates that followed a fundraising scandal involving life insurance companies. But it had no enforcement mechanism. Reform efforts puttered along for decades until the explosion in popularity of television in the 1950s and 1960s led to ever-escalating costs for running for office.
The current campaign finance regime was born in 1971 when Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act, which was then expanded in 1974 following Watergate revelations about illegal campaign fundraising practices, including violations of the Tillman Act.
The law created campaign contribution limits for parties and candidates, mandatory disclosure, an enforcement body in the FEC, public financing of presidential elections and bans on certain abusive practices. A key part of the law, however, was its limits on campaign spending: These limits were meant to reduce the influence of money in politics by stopping the rise in campaign costs on the back end, while the contribution limits sought to reduce the potential for big-donor corruption on the front end.
In 1976, the Supreme Court struck down the law’s limits on campaign spending in the case of Buckley v. Valeo, on the grounds that they impinged on the First Amendment right to free speech. This came just as congressional elections were about to become much more competitive.
A campaign money arms race quickly ensued — and it hasn’t let up. Without spending limits, the push for limited campaign contributions exploded. Political party actors and ideological activists sought opportunistic advantages at every turn, through unlimited soft-money party contributions to exploiting political action committee and nonprofit loopholes.
Reformers sought to plug some of these holes with the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, popularly known as McCain-Feingold, which banned soft money donated to a party for spending on so-called issue advocacy and party-building efforts, limited outside spending and cracked down on wealthy, self-financing candidates. But the Supreme Court’s shift to the right that began with the appointments of Chief Justice John Roberts in 2005 and Justice Samuel Alito in 2006 has effectively neutered that law.
This started in 2007 when the court blew up the McCain-Feingold limits on corporate-funded issue ads by nonprofits, ruling that the limits violated the free speech rights of those corporations and groups. Then, in 2010, the Citizens United decision vastly expanded that to all outside spending: The court ruled that corporations could freely fund independent political spending, saying that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” A lower court extended that ruling to allow funds from individuals, which enabled the creation of the super PAC.
A wide array of outside groups immediately popped up — many with explicit connections to parties and candidates, despite the court’s supposed insistence on independence. Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign incubated the super PAC Restore Our Future before he announced his candidacy and then made it “independent” afterward.
The lines of independence continued to crumble thanks to enforcement decisions by the FEC. Candidates were allowed to appear at super PAC fundraisers so long as they did not personally ask for sums exceeding the candidate contribution limit. Super PACs could use materials and information posted online by candidates and parties, including videos, images, ad messaging and targeting strategy. In the 2016 GOP presidential primaries, single-candidate super PACs effectively took over campaign operations by hosting rallies where their candidate would appear as a “special guest.” Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign was accused of openly coordinating with the super PAC Correct the Record — and was let off the hook by the FEC.
The coup de grâce came in early 2024, after the law firm of Democratic Party lawyer Marc Elias petitioned the FEC to allow a Democratic-aligned super PAC in Texas to coordinate with candidates when engaged in voter turnout efforts. The FEC’s decision gave the thumbs-up to direct coordination between candidates, parties and super PACs on one of the most vital elements of campaigning: voter engagement and turnout.
But it wasn’t Democrats who took advantage. Republicansimmediately seized the opportunity. Trump outsourced his ground game to groups like Turning Point USA and Musk’s America PAC while directly coordinating with them. Whatever lines existed between the independent spending envisioned by the Supreme Court in its Citizens United ruling and the candidates and parties backed by such groups were no more.
This, now the state of affairs in 2025, is the worst possible system for campaign funding. Political parties are husks turned into personalistic fiefdoms by conquering warlords, like the Republicans, or incapable of leadership, policy prioritization and decision making, like the Democrats. State parties are in even worse shape, needing to beg for funds from their national party, thus making it impossible for them to create an independent identity. Filling their place are outside groups, with their phony independence providing billionaires like Musk a chance to assert control.
Campaign contribution limits are effectively void now that super PACs can explicitly coordinate with candidates and parties. However, lawmakers still need to raise limited contributions on a nonstop basis for themselves and their party, leaving less time for legislating. This was made even worse by the Supreme Court’s 2014 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC that ended aggregate limits on campaign contributions, thus expanding how much a particular donor could give in one cycle. Any concerns about the corrupting influence of money in politics are only growing.
At the same time, the Citizens United decision led to a dramatic increase in the amount of campaign spending funded by undisclosed donors. The public may not know the identity of the hundreds of millions in dark money spent on elections since then, but the candidates and party actors — who, after all, can appear at their fundraisers — likely do.
And future hopes for reforming these issues are slim to none. Democrats almost passed legislation in 2022 that would have closed some of the loopholes in super PAC coordination, changed the structure of the FEC and introduced limited public financing of House elections, but were stymied by the refusal of then-Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to bypass the filibuster to do so.
Of course, that bill could not have done anything about the ultimate obstacle to fixing the death spiral of campaign finance reform: the Supreme Court. The court’s decisions in Buckley and Citizens United make it impossible to place limits on campaign spending or rein in the outside spending that is now swamping politics and empowering literally the richest man in the world. The conservative court continues to strip away existing campaign finance laws and would likely find cause to strike down elements of Democrats’ reforms if they passed.
There is also no hope for a court more amenable to campaign finance reform in the near or medium terms. The late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor was the last Republican-appointed justice to be favorable to campaign finance laws. Her replacement by Alito began reform’s death. The only hope that reformers had was for a Democrat, whether it be Clinton or Barack Obama, to appoint Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement after he died in 2016. Mitch McConnell, known as the “Darth Vader of campaign finance reform,” made sure that didn’t happen. Then, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s untimely death gave Republicans a sixth seat on the court.
If Alito, Roberts or Justice Clarence Thomas retire during Trump’s second presidential term, the six-vote conservative supermajority will extend for at least the next few decades.
This doesn’t mean that concerns about the role of money in politics need to die with the existing system of reform. It may in fact be the one issue on which the public is almost universally united: Americans are overwhelmingly unhappy with a political system beholden to money over constituents, and broadly desire reforms that would course-correct the existing operation. Reformers, in turn, need to recalibrate what they intend reforms to accomplish away from their 1970s roots in devolving party power to the people and toward a reinvigoration of democratic parties if they are to fight against the rising tide of oligarchic wealth that outside spending represents.
Political parties, when allowed to function properly, are vital tools of democracy. Parties provide structure for democratic decision making, policy prioritization and coalition mobilization that ideological or self-interested actors cannot. Absent those structures, or undermined by the rise of and reliance on billionaire-funded super PACs and dark money, you get the personalistic rule of Trump and Musk, or the “shambolic” process that led to Joe Biden stepping aside in last year’s presidential race. Rebuilding parties can be a way to fight against the corrupting influence of so-called independent spending.
The constitutional amendment process, however far-fetched, is the only real hope for reining in money in politics. Overturning the Buckley and Citizens United decisions is the only way to actually enable reform to work. The other option is reforming the Supreme Court to bring about a different majority in this lifetime.
The reform project may be at its nadir as the corruption of big money takes the throne. That doesn’t mean it cannot reimagine what fighting the influence of money in politics means in the 21st century. But it may very well take some hard reconsideration of which reforms are beneficial — and which ones undermine the broader goal of a more equal and sustainable democracy.