The law is clear. Super PACs cannot coordinate with the campaigns they support. The Federal Election Commission's regulations prohibit any "cooperation, consultation, or concert" between an outside spending group and a candidate's campaign. The statute is unambiguous. The intent is obvious. The enforcement record is not.
In fourteen years since Citizens United, the FEC has never fined a super PAC for coordinating with a campaign. Three coordination investigations were opened during that period. The total in fines from all three: $26,000. That is the complete enforcement record for an industry that spent $3.4 billion in the 2024 election cycle alone.
What a Super PAC Actually Is
A super PAC — formally an "independent expenditure-only committee" — can raise unlimited money from corporations, billionaires, and unions. It can spend that money on advertising, voter contact, and opposition research without any cap. The one thing it cannot legally do is coordinate with the candidate it supports. No shared strategy. No shared staff. No working in concert.
This structure emerged directly from Citizens United. The Supreme Court's majority argued that independent spending — money spent without formally coordinating with a campaign — cannot corrupt elections. Since there is no exchange between donor and candidate, there is no quid pro quo. Since there is no quid pro quo, there is no corruption. Since there is no corruption, there is no compelling government interest in restricting the spending.
The entire legal edifice rests on the independence being real.
The Jeb Bush Blueprint
The most instructive example of how this works in practice happened before a single vote was cast in 2016.
Before Jeb Bush officially declared his candidacy for president, his super PAC — Right to Rise — had already raised more than $100 million. The organization was run by Mike Murphy, Bush's longtime finance director, operating through a separate LLC. Right to Rise shared 75 vendors with the Bush campaign. They coordinated messaging, strategy, and advertising without ever technically violating the letter of the law — because the two organizations maintained "independent" status on paper while sharing everything in practice.
No fine was issued. No investigation was opened.
The Wink and Nod Playbook
After Citizens United, campaigns and their allied super PACs developed a set of workarounds so common they are now standard operating procedure.
Campaigns post strategy documents to YouTube with titles like "Voters Need to Know." The super PAC watches, takes notes, and runs ads built around the messaging. No phone call required. Campaigns upload raw b-roll footage to public online folders. The super PAC downloads and edits it into ads. Technically independent. Practically seamless.
In 2016, researchers identified 632 instances of a campaign and its allied super PAC hiring the same vendor in the same election cycle. The vendor receives direction from the campaign and simultaneously does work for the super PAC — serving as a conduit for strategy that the law prohibits passing directly. The coordination is structural. The paper trail is absent. The system functions exactly as designed.
John Oliver: Congressional Fundraising — Why the 'No Coordination' Rule Is a Fiction
Why Nothing Happens
The Federal Election Commission was designed with six commissioners — three from each party — and requires four votes to act on anything substantive. Since Citizens United, meaningful enforcement votes almost always deadlock 3-3. Republicans routinely block enforcement actions against conservative super PACs. Democrats block actions against liberal ones. The result is an agency that exists without functioning.
The FEC's commissioners themselves have acknowledged the problem. Ann Ravel, a Democratic commissioner who served from 2013 to 2017, said the agency was "worse than dysfunctional" and that Republicans on the commission were "determined to prevent the agency from doing its job." Her Republican counterpart, Lee Goodman, argued the other side was trying to weaponize enforcement against protected speech.
Both sides block each other. Nothing happens.
What the Dissent Warned
Justice Stevens's principal dissent in Citizens United included a warning the majority chose not to engage: "Corruption can take many forms. Bribery may be the paradigm case. But the difference between selling a vote and selling access is a matter of degree, not kind. And selling access is not qualitatively different from giving special preference to those who spent money on one's behalf."
The super PAC system did not fail because bad actors ignored the rules. It failed because the rules were built without functioning enforcement mechanisms, administered by an agency structurally incapable of acting, in a legal environment where spending money on elections had been declared protected speech.
The no-coordination rule is legally real. It is, in practice, a polite fiction — a rule everyone knows will not be enforced, observed primarily so the industry can point to it when asked.