The Watchdog That Isn't Watching the Midterms

This week offered a tidy illustration of how campaign finance law is supposed to work, and how little that matters when nobody is left to enforce it. On Wednesday, Elon Musk's America PAC disclosed roughly $800,000 in independent spending on behalf of Republican candidates, the super PAC's first reported outlay of the 2026 midterm cycle. The same week, in the Texas Senate race the PAC's single largest check was meant to help, the Democratic campaign filed a formal complaint accusing Republican nominee Ken Paxton of running an illegal dark-money operation through his own campaign treasurer. Both episodes are, in their way, the system functioning exactly as written. The trouble is that the agency responsible for reading the filings, investigating the complaint, and punishing anyone who broke the rules has been unable to do any of those things for nearly a year and a half.

The Money Now Moving

America PAC's disclosure, covering expenditures from August 18 through August 31, shows the group spending on seven Senate races and several House contests, with two more rounds planned for September 10. According to the committee's own record with the Federal Election Commission, the single biggest beneficiary was Paxton, the Texas attorney general now running for Senate, who received more than $247,000 in mailer spending. Maine's Susan Collins got $170,000, and Ohio's Jon Husted got roughly $105,000, with smaller sums flowing to House candidates in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Wisconsin and Florida. The spending is entirely lawful. Groups like America PAC are permitted to spend unlimited sums on communications that do not coordinate with a candidate's own campaign, provided they file the disclosures required under the rules governing independent expenditures, which is exactly what happened here.

The disclosure also marks a reversal. In May 2025, Musk told an audience at the Qatar Economic Forum that he intended to do "a lot less" political spending going forward, saying, "I think I've done enough." He has instead authorized America PAC to spend as much as $120 million on a field program targeting Senate races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine, Michigan and Ohio, with Texas and other states under consideration, according to prior reporting on the group's plans. The August filing is the first hard evidence that money is actually moving.

A Campaign That Needs the Help

Paxton's outsized share of the PAC's money is not hard to explain. He defeated Senator John Cornyn in a May primary runoff, becoming the first incumbent Texas senator in decades to lose renomination, and has struggled to raise money since. Democratic nominee James Talarico outraised him roughly three-to-one in the second quarter and has outspent him on advertising by nearly 200 to 1, according to the Texas Tribune's review of the race. Cornyn himself has said he is directing his own fundraising elsewhere, telling the paper that Texas has become "a black hole when it comes to campaign cash" and that Paxton "is a poor campaigner" who "doesn't raise money."

That vacuum is what Talarico's campaign says a nonprofit called Preserve Texas has been filling improperly. In a complaint filed with the FEC on September 2, campaign manager Seth Krasne alleged that Paxton and his campaign treasurer, John Plishka, control the Virginia-registered group, which funneled more than $1 million in four checks to a super PAC called Lone Star Liberty that then ran a $15 million ad campaign across 18 Texas media markets, according to a CBS News account of the filing. The complaint argues that structure would let Paxton's own team direct spending that is supposed to be independent of his campaign, evading contribution limits set by federal law. Paxton has not been charged with anything, and the allegation is, for now, just that: an allegation.

A Watchdog Down to Two People

Here is the part that matters more than either campaign's numbers. Complaints like the one against Paxton's operation, and disclosures like America PAC's, are supposed to be reviewed by six FEC commissioners divided evenly between the parties, with four votes needed to open an investigation, issue a rule, or impose a fine. Right now the commission has two. Commissioner Ellen Weintraub was dismissed in February 2025; Republican commissioners Sean Cooksey and Allen Dickerson resigned earlier that year, and a third Republican, Trey Trainor, announced his own departure in September. The commission lost its quorum in April 2025 and has not regained it since, a fact the agency's own leadership page now confirms, listing just two sitting members, both Democrats. The FEC has formally notified the public of the gap in a lack-of-quorum notice and has canceled its public meetings through the rest of 2026.

"Other people report that we're hobbled, and I hate to agree with it, but we are hobbled," FEC Chair Shana Broussard has said of the commission's condition.

That quote, reported by NOTUS's coverage of the shutdown, understates the practical effect. Without a quorum, the commission cannot open new investigations, cannot formalize audits, cannot issue fines, and cannot write the guidance that tells campaigns and super PACs what the rules actually mean in a case like Paxton's. Three nominees to fill the vacant seats, two Republicans and one Democrat, have been sitting before the Senate for months without confirmation votes. Meanwhile the PAC spending itself keeps flowing, filed and disclosed exactly as the law requires, because filing a disclosure requires no commissioner's approval. Enforcing what the disclosure reveals does.

What's at Stake, and What Should Happen Next

It would be a mistake to read this as an argument that Musk, or Paxton, or anyone else named here has necessarily broken the law. Independent expenditures by super PACs have been protected since the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, and disclosure, on its own terms, is doing what it is designed to do: the public can see, within days, exactly which races America PAC is funding and in what amounts. Defenders of a lean FEC, including some Republican commissioners who have served on it, have long argued that a commission split evenly by design was never meant to be an aggressive enforcer, and that gridlock reflects legitimate disagreement about how far federal regulators should reach into political speech. There is a real argument, not just a partisan one, that Congress built the FEC to move slowly.

But a commission with no members to disagree with each other is not gridlock. It is absence. A dark-money complaint filed against a Senate campaign in September will not be examined in September, or plausibly at all, before Texans vote in November. A rival super PAC that believes America PAC has crossed a coordination line has nowhere to bring that claim and expect a ruling before the election it concerns. Every disclosure filed for the rest of this cycle will land in the same building as the last one: read by reporters and lawyers, acted on by no one with the authority to act.

The remedy here does not require rewriting campaign finance law, tightening Citizens United, or resolving the genuine argument over how aggressive an FEC should be. It requires the Senate to hold confirmation votes on the three pending nominees and restore the four-member quorum the statute contemplates, so that whichever side of the enforcement debate prevails, someone is actually casting a vote. Until that happens, the 2026 midterms will run on a campaign finance system that still requires everyone to disclose and requires no one to answer for what the disclosures show. Money in the Texas Senate race, and in the six other Senate contests America PAC has now entered, is not unregulated. It is unsupervised, which in practice amounts to much the same thing.