Joni Ernst Is Backing Down After Hiding the Names of Her Campaign Staff

It’s arrangements like that, experts say, that show the need for detailed reporting of the staffers on a campaign’s payroll. Without it, they say, the public has no way of knowing if a campaign is employing someone whose identity might be of public interest—say a family member or a business associate—or who also happens to have worked with allied groups with which the campaign is legally restricted from coordinating. “They can’t do that,” Brendan Fischer, the director of Federal and FEC reforms at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan ethics group, said of the payroll non-disclosure setup that the Ernst campaign is now ditching. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a campaign stop reporting any payments to individual staffers, and instead just report lump-sum payments to a payroll company.”

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