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On a single day last year, one of President Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committees sent nearly $1.5 million to 46 Republican Party committees in states and territories. Each of them, in turn, immediately routed those exact same amounts to the Republican National Committee.
Routine transfers like those are a hallmark of how joint fundraising committees move money through the party system. But a recent Supreme Court ruling has raised their stakes: Political parties may now fully coordinate with federal candidates on how to spend that money.
In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the court on June 30 struck down decades-old limits on how much political parties can spend in coordination with candidates for Congress and the presidency. The decision instantly expanded how millions of dollars already sitting in joint fundraising committees, or JFCs, can be used. The 6-3 ruling from the court’s conservative majority gave the parties and JFCs significantly more power, with Justice Elena Kagan noting in her dissent that “the party can serve as the candidate’s checking account.”
It will be months before FEC filings reflect any resulting spending shifts. But how parties and JFCs wield this new authority is poised to become a defining subplot in the run-up to the midterm elections.
Used widely by both parties, JFCs work by pulling in large checks from donors and splitting the money across multiple committees according to a predetermined formula that adheres to federal contribution limits.
Before the ruling, once funds flowed into party accounts, the parties could not legally coordinate with candidates on how to spend most of it. Instead, they had to largely rely on independent expenditures. Under the Federal Election Campaign Act, national party committees were limited to coordinated spending of between $65,300 and $130,600 for individual House candidates, depending on the size of the state; between $130,600 and about $4.1 million for Senate; and up to $32 million for a presidential candidate.
Those firewalls are now gone, and JFC transfers can flow directly into candidate-approved ad campaigns, polling, voter targeting and core campaign strategy.
“Joint fundraising committees will continue to proliferate. While the trend toward joint fundraising is already well underway, its value just increased,” attorneys Michael Bayes and Matthew Petersen of the Washington-based law firm Holtzman Vogel wrote in The National Law Review. “Candidates and national party committees are even more incentivized to raise funds together now that they also may spend those funds together.”
The ruling provides ultrawealthy Americans seeking to influence candidates an avenue to “pump money” into either the parties or the JFCs closely tied to their preferred candidates, said Michael Beckel, the director of money in politics reform at the nonpartisan research group Issue One.
“That’s a huge amplifier of their voices and their power in the political process,” Beckel told OpenSecrets.
During the current election cycle, the 906 active JFCs ended the first quarter with nearly $105 million in cash on hand, FEC records show. The top 10 JFCs held more than $63 million, and four bearing Trump’s name banked nearly $37 million.
The court’s ruling allows candidates and parties to fully coordinate how to spend those war chests.
“These joint fundraising committees could play a much bigger role in these solicitations that the candidates are making, and that money, in turn, can be spent much more directly to aid their own campaigns and not just help the team broadly,” Beckel said.
For years, JFCs were often treated as a vehicle of convenience for donors seeking to streamline their giving with a single check.
“Now they’re much more part of the campaign finance infrastructure in any competitive race,” he continued. “You’ve got candidates who are just trying to funnel every dollar into a joint fundraising committee, rather than their own campaign, because donors who can give even more than the legal max directly to their candidacy will be able to spend that extra money into the political party. And there’s not a lot of donors who are going to be able to hit that limit.”
Navigating the Limits
Individual donors remain bound by federal contribution limits that top out at $3,500 per election per candidate and $44,300 annually to each of various national party committees.
However, federal law places no limits on transfers between state parties and their national parent committees. In her dissent, Kagan highlighted how the practice allows a donor to maximize contributions to a candidate, the national party and all 50 state party committees with a single check to a JFC – producing a money flow that resembles earmarking but remains perfectly legal. Those state affiliates can then seamlessly pass the cash back to the national committee, newly free to spend every dollar in coordination with the candidate.
So while a donor may only give $7,000 directly to a candidate’s campaign committee per cycle (if maxing out to both the primary and general election efforts), that donor also may route more than $600,000 through a matrix of committees. Before the ruling, caps on coordinated expenditures ensured that most of that money went to general party operations. Now, the candidate may direct how every penny is spent.
“What is supposed to be just the sum of an individual or group’s capped donations to 51 separate party committees instead goes in a single straight shot” to a candidate, Kagan wrote. “And then that can happen again and again and again. It does not take much imagination to see how that scheme circumvents the contribution limit for a candidate, and raises the risk of both actual and apparent quid pro quo corruption.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, rejected Kagan’s argument, asserting that existing anti-earmarking laws do enough to prevent donors from using JFCs to illegally bankroll a specific candidate beyond legal limits.
Still, the ruling has prompted predictions from campaign finance attorneys that the ruling could “supercharge” the use of JFCs and that congressional party committees may establish new fundraising tools to capitalize on the expanded coordination rules.
“The end of coordinated expenditure limits provides an incentive for the congressional party committees (NRSC, DSCC, NRCC, DCCC) to create similar vehicles so that major donors can give large, combined contributions for the parties to put to use in coordination with candidates and their campaigns,” wrote Robert Kelner and colleagues at the Washington‑based law firm Covington & Burling. “Candidates may have more incentive to raise money for parties, whether directly or via joint fundraising committees, to ensure the party has money to support them.”
The NRSC signaled its intent almost immediately. In a June 30 memo to campaigns, it said it would end its traditional independent expenditure spending in favor of fully coordinated spending developed directly with candidates. It also explicitly advised them to “preserve direct campaign dollars for where they’re most valuable” and use the NRSC to absorb costs “where centralization creates efficiency.” OpenSecrets reached out to an NRSC spokesperson but did not immediately receive a response.
Which JFCs Have the Most Cash?
The pass-through mechanism at the heart of Kagan’s warning is far from theoretical. Top-of-ticket candidates from both parties tested those boundaries during the dozen years that followed the court’s McCutcheon v. FEC ruling in 2014 that struck down aggregate individual contribution limits.
The Trump 47 Committee appears to be the most recent to use it on a large scale, doing so on a busy March 5, 2025. The JFC that day made transfers of net proceeds to GOP committees in 45 states and Guam, sending as much as $251,287.59 to the Rhode Island Republican State Central Committee and as little as $17,951.42 to the New Hampshire Republican State Committee. Also that day, those committees sent those very same amounts to the RNC.
Every dollar Trump 47 has disbursed during this election cycle has gone to its affiliated committees – including the RNC, Trump’s Save America leadership PAC and those state Republican parties. While Trump is not on the midterm ballot, the four JFCs aligned with him each hold more than $3 million, a reminder of the financial leverage his fundraising network carries within the GOP.
- The Trump National Committee JFC Inc. leads all joint committees in both receipts (nearly $88 million) and cash on hand (nearly $22.7 million). It has transferred $29.4 million to the Trump leadership PAC Never Surrender Inc and $24.5 million to the RNC.
- The Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee has taken in $13.8 million, has a $4.9 million war chest and functions as a pass-through that has sent all of its net proceeds to another Trump leadership PAC, Save America.
- The Trump Make America Great Again Committee has just $894 in receipts this cycle, but holds $3.2 million in cash on hand after raising more than $29.6 million four years ago. It has made no transfers to candidates, instead spending $12,000 on fees.
- Trump 47 holds $5.8 million in cash on hand with just over $600,000 in receipts. That JFC raised $368 million during the 2023-24 cycle.
Speaker Mike Johnson’s JFC, Grow The Majority — which is linked to more than 70 Republican entities — has raised $83.4 million with $10.6 million in cash on hand. And both candidates in North Carolina’s battleground Senate race have JFCs that rank in the top six in cash on hand, with the one aligned with Democratic former Gov. Roy Cooper ($4.2 million) leading that of former RNC chair Michael Whatley ($3.8 million). The only other Democrat with a top-10 JFC is California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose Campaign for Democracy Committee held $2.6 million in cash on hand after raising $9.8 million.
“It is highly likely that any candidate in a contested race is going to start raising more money through a joint fundraising committee and see more ad buys with party-backed donors, donors who are giving to the national party, accounting for larger and larger shares of the ad buys,” Beckel said. “It’s almost going to become de rigour to have a joint fundraising committee that’s accepting these large contributions if you are in a competitive House race or competitive Senate race.”
Covington & Burling declined to make Kelner or his colleagues available for an interview, but their written analysis contains a prediction that summarizes the landscape: Under the new legal framework, “major donors will be under increased pressure to give the maximum amount allowed to parties and their joint committees.”
The next step in the evolution of fundraising, Beckel said, could be the rise of so-called “mega-joint fundraising committees” that simultaneously link a candidate to a national party and dozens of state party committees “that, in turn, funnel their money back to the national party committee.” Such a vehicle, he said, would allow an individual donor to contribute more than $1.6 million over a two-year period.
“Will we see a rise of mega-joint fundraising committees designed to aid specific candidates?” he concluded. “That’s certainly a trend to be on the lookout for.”
This story was originally published by OpenSecrets.
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