The widespread corruption and dysfunction plaguing our political process and government are largely the result of our broken campaign finance system, which has for decades favored wealthy donors over voters and failed to provide real transparency and accountability regarding the sources of massive election spending and influence.
Policies favored by everyday Americans stall and disappear at the whim of special interests that routinely spend many millions of dollars supporting the candidates who will do their bidding and opposing those who won’t.
While the U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC is frequently blamed for causing these problems — and Citizens United did make matters worse — the roots of our present democratic malaise predate that ruling by more than three decades.
On January 30, 1976, the Supreme Court decided Buckley v. Valeo, a case concerning the post-Watergate amendments to the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), the law that regulates money in federal elections. Buckley promised a transparent campaign finance system that would hold corruption at bay.
Yet the political landscape today is dominated by wealthy special interests who spend money on elections in return for policy influence, and sometimes even tangible government benefits.
To truly ensure that “We the people” — not just the ultrawealthy — have a voice in our democracy for the next 50 years and beyond, we need to move our campaign finance system past the fundamentally flawed Buckley framework.
Unlimited Election Spending Is Corrupting Politicians and Silencing Everyday Americans
In Buckley, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of FECA’s limits on independent election spending — i.e. money spent to influence an election that isn’t coordinated with a candidate or political party.
While the justices upheld limits on campaign contributions, they struck down these spending limits, holding that independent spending poses no risk of corruption.
Because this money must be spent without coordination or direction from a candidate, the justices reasoned that independent spending could not be valuable enough to encourage quid pro quo corruption. They also emphasized that independent spending would be independent, so there would not be opportunities for candidates and spenders to interact and enter into corrupt agreements.
But those assumptions proved dead wrong.
While it was always naive to think candidates would not reward their biggest supporters, the Supreme Court exacerbated its miscalculation in Citizens United, which radically altered the electoral landscape by allowing corporations to spend money on elections.
The rise of such spending, in turn, paved the way for super PACs, which allow ultrawealthy individuals and corporations to pool unlimited amounts of money — much of it funneled through “dark money” groups — to spend on election influence.
These developments have made independent spending an incredibly powerful force in our elections, prompting candidates to eagerly seek super PAC support, including through the types of exchanges that the Buckley Court believed to be impossible.
For example, prosecutors indicted Senator Robert Menendez for soliciting approximately $300,000 in donations to a super PAC supporting his reelection campaign, in exchange for intervening with federal regulators on behalf of the donor.
In 2016, steel magnate Barry Zekelman directed $1.75 million to a pro-Trump super PAC, which the first Trump administration rewarded by hosting Zekelman at a private dinner and then imposing caps on steel imports from his competitors.
The second Trump administration is rife with similar examples of super PAC donors corruptly receiving benefits, including high-level positions in Trump’s administration, pardons for individuals convicted of federal crimes, and policies that favor donors’ business interests.
Another reason candidates and officeholders find super PAC support so attractive is that — contrary to the Supreme Court’s assumption in Buckley and Citizens United — “independent” expenditures are routinely not independent at all.
Federal Election Commission (FEC) rules barring coordination between candidates and outside spending groups are weak, laden with FEC-created loopholes, and virtually never enforced.
Buckley’s miscalculation about the impact of independent expenditures has not only created a system where wealthy special interests can corrupt politicians; it has also wrongly prioritized the First Amendment rights of special interests while ignoring those of everyday Americans.
Most of the electorate has been effectively silenced because they lack the financial clout to meaningfully voice their needs and preferences.
During the 2024 election, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, used an FEC-created loophole to spend over $230 million supporting Trump’s presidential candidacy with a voter-outreach canvassing program run through his super PAC, America First, which openly coordinated with the Trump campaign.
In exchange, Trump created the U.S. DOGE Service (DOGE) and appointed Musk as its head, providing Musk with a perch within the government to benefit his companies and further increase his wealth.
Musk’s unrestrained ability to purchase unparalleled influence at the highest levels of our government illustrates just how wrong Buckley was — both in its assumptions about corruption and its exclusive focus on protecting the electoral voices of the ultrawealthy at the expense of everyone else.
Special Interests’ Election Spending Is Often Concealed From Voters
In Buckley and Citizens United, the Supreme Court emphatically reaffirmed the importance of disclosure requirements as a means of deterring corruption.
Transparency laws allow regulators to spot violations, and — most importantly — give voters the information they are entitled to about which wealthy special interests are paying to influence their decisions and curry favor with candidates and elected officials.
But the Court’s promise of transparency has proved elusive after Citizens United. Now that corporations can spend money on elections, entities like 501(c)(4)s and LLCs, which do not have to disclose their donors, can secretly spend vast amounts to influence elections — either directly or by funneling money to super PACs.
These “dark money” entities collectively spent $1.9 billion on the 2024 election — a figure that has dramatically grown over the past 15 years.
Voters may not know who the true source is behind this spending, but dark money groups can inform candidates who are supporting them in the dark — ensuring candidates know exactly who is responsible for spending massive amounts in their favor.
As a result, candidates become beholden to these dark money donors, while the public has no way to detect these relationships.
The FEC can require dark money groups to register as political committees and disclose their donors, but it almost never does so, which has contributed to the proliferation of secret spending and underscores the need for reform.
It’s Time to Fix Our Broken Campaign Finance System
Half a century on, Buckley continues to undermine our democracy, both through its flawed assumptions and inappropriately narrow focus on the First Amendment rights of wealthy donors, while ignoring the competing First Amendment interests of everyday voters.
While it would take a new Supreme Court decision or a constitutional amendment to overturn Buckley, there are reforms that policymakers can pursue now to curb the corrosive effect of big money in politics.
The FEC, which consistently fails to enforce federal campaign finance laws and even creates opportunities for corruption to spread, should be reformed through measures like the Freedom to Vote Act that would help ensure that the agency is fulfilling its original purpose: protecting voters’ First Amendment right to have a meaningful voice in their democracy.
Congress should also address the erosion of anti-coordination and transparency laws. For example, the DISCLOSE Act would shine a light on dark money, and reforms like the Stop Illegal Coordination Act and the Anti-Corruption and Public Integrity Act would reduce candidate-super PAC coordination.
The past five decades under Buckley have clearly shown that our campaign finance system is allowing wealthy special interests to dominate the political process, which ultimately drowns out the voices of ordinary voters.
It is past time that Congress and the federal courts focus broadly on the First Amendment rights of everyday Americans, not just ultrawealthy special interests.
At Campaign Legal Center, we’ve worked to highlight instances of money corrupting our politics, called on the FEC and the courts to step in and enforce our campaign finance laws when they’re broken, and worked alongside policymakers to advance new solutions that protect every American’s right to effectively participate in our democracy.
Support us today as we continue to advance and defend the legal guardrails of our campaign finance system.