Tools · Rules as written
“Super PAC” is what people say when they mean “a committee that can take big money.” Federal law recognizes seven or so vehicles, and which one you need falls out of four questions: does money go to candidates, does money come in above the limits, do donors go on the public record, and who is standing behind it. Answer them and get the committee type, the Form 1 box to check, the filing calendar, and your disclaimer line.
What you need
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FEC Form 1, line 5, box
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The fine print
Every public communication a committee pays for and no candidate authorized carries one of these. It needs the committee’s full name plus a permanent street address, phone number, or website. Print gets a boxed, readable version; radio and TV add a spoken “is responsible for the content of this advertising.”
Regular reports are the easy part — they arrive on a schedule you can put in a calendar. Independent expenditure reports arrive whenever you spend, and the clock tightens in the last three weeks of a race, which is exactly when you are spending most.
The trap on the other side
Everything above pushes information out: every donor over $200 itemized by name, address, employer, and occupation, published in bulk and free to download. It is, on its face, the best-targeted prospect list in the country — current, machine readable, and filtered to people who have already proved they write political cheques. Federal law singles it out. Information copied from any report filed under the Act may not be sold or used by any person to solicit contributions or for any commercial purpose.
And they check. The same subsection carries a salting provision: the Commission may seed the public files with fictitious names, so anyone who scrapes a report and mails it announces themselves in the act of doing it. It is the rare disclosure rule with a tripwire attached, and it exists because the temptation is obvious to everyone who looks at the data.
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Written law. Each one cites the provision.
Observed practice, not regulation. Weigh it accordingly.
A different kind of section. Everything else in this tool is the rules as written. This one is mostly not — where the money comes from is a question about practice, and practice has no citation. The two are kept in separate lists above for exactly that reason, and anything that could not be cited is labelled as something people do rather than something you must. Figures and sourcing are in theresearch memo, which also records that no committee’s website could be loaded first-hand when it was compiled — the tactics come from trade press, platform documentation, benchmark studies, and FEC and court records rather than from the live pages.
The packet
The picker tells you which committee you need. This turns that answer, plus the dozen facts only you know, into the paperwork: the Statement of Organization field by field, all three disclaimer variants, the notices that have to appear on any ask for money, a registration deadline counted off your own trigger date, and a formation checklist. Blanks stay visibly blank — a packet that looks finished and is not is worse than one that shows its holes.
Committee name and the website, phone, or address come from the disclaimer builder above.
The whole packet is free. Print it or download it as plain text — nothing to unlock, no account, no payment.
What this is. A generated transcription aid built from the published rules, offered as a document rather than as advice. It is not a filed form, it is not reviewed by a lawyer, and it does not create any professional relationship. The FEC’s own forms and instructions are free at fec.gov.Forming a political committee is a place where the difference between a map of the rules and legal advice matters. Everything you type stays in your browser — the packet is generated locally and no committee details are ever sent anywhere.
| Vehicle | Form 1 box | Money in | To candidates | Donors public |
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| Super PAC | 5(g) | Unlimited, any source | Never | Yes |
| Hybrid PAC (Carey) | 5(h) | Unlimited & limited, split accounts | Limited account only | Yes |
| Nonconnected PAC | 5(f) | $5,000 / person / year | $5,000 per election* | Yes |
| Leadership PAC | 5(f) | $5,000 / person / year | $5,000 per election* | Yes |
| Separate segregated fund | 5(e) | Restricted class only | $5,000 per election* | Yes |
| 501(c)(4) | — | Unlimited, any source | Never | No |
| State or local committee | — | State law | State law | State law |
*$3,500 per election until multicandidate status — six months registered, more than 50 donors, and contributions to at least five federal candidates.
The paperwork is the easy part. The interesting question is what makes a person decide they need their own committee — and the answers are more varied than “a rich man wanted to buy an election.”
The ceiling
That is the cap on what an individual can give a federal candidate per election. Into a super PAC there is no cap at all. Blake Murray, a Divvy co-founder, put $3 million into Put Utah First; Jay Faison put $2 million into Conservative Values for Utah. Neither could have given either candidate more than the price of a used car directly.
The dirty work
Candidates want to be seen shaking hands, not throwing punches, and an ad ending “I approve this message” costs them something when it goes negative. Independent money has no such problem. Put Utah First spent $4.59 million against Mike Lee and $784,000 supporting Evan McMullin — six dollars of attack for every dollar of advocacy.
The industry
Fairshake raised roughly $203 million for the 2024 cycle to elect a Congress friendlier to crypto, with about 94 percent of it traceable to four companies. Almost every candidate it backed won. One industry, one cycle, a reputation as a kingmaker.
The wedge
You do not need nine figures. Friends of Traditional Banking has spent a decade picking roughly two congressional races per cycle and pouring its members into them, on the theory that a modest sum is decisive in a race nobody else is watching. It runs on a few hundred thousand dollars.
The point
Stephen Colbert registered Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow on air in 2011, walked his audience through the paperwork, raised about $1.2 million, and used it to demonstrate that the rules permitted nearly everything viewers assumed they forbade. The FEC processed it like any other filing, because it was one.
Right to Rise USA raised about $118 million to elect Jeb Bush — at the time the largest pile of money ever assembled behind a primary candidate. He suspended his campaign on 20 February 2016, before Super Tuesday. Money buys reach. It does not buy a message people want.
Seven committees that each changed what people thought the tool was for. Ordered by when they landed, not by size — the smallest one on the list taught the most.
Not a spender — a lawsuit. A group that wanted to pool unlimited money for independent ads sued the FEC and won in the D.C. Circuit, months after Citizens United. Together the two decisions created the category. Every committee on this page descends from that case.
The archetype, built by Karl Rove, and the clearest public example of the two-entity structure: a disclosing super PAC paired with a sister 501(c)(4), Crossroads GPS, that did not have to name its donors. That pairing is exactly what the picker refuses to route you to.
Founded by three former Romney aides to back Romney. It established the single-candidate super PAC as standard equipment for a presidential run — a shadow campaign with better funding and no coordination, at least officially.
The Democratic answer, and proof the tool was bipartisan within one cycle. Its Bain Capital ads are the case study every consultant cites for what outside money can do to a challenger’s biography.
The most money ever raised behind a primary candidate, and the campaign was over before Super Tuesday. Cited ever since by everyone arguing that campaign money is overrated.
Stephen Colbert’s. Famous for being real — a functioning FEC-registered super PAC run as a televised civics lesson, including the (c)(4) hand-off that let him take money without naming who gave it.
The crypto industry’s machine, roughly 94 percent funded by four companies. It went nearly undefeated and turned a single sector into a bloc that congressional offices answer the phone for.
Utah has its own, and they are a fair sample of the whole population: two built for a single Senate seat and then dissolved, and one small, patient outfit that has been filing quarterly since 2012 and has never made a headline. Committee IDs are live links to the FEC record.
The obscure one
A super PAC in a Sandy post office box, grown out of the Utah Bankers Association, still filing quarterly fourteen years later. Its whole strategy is restraint: pick about two congressional races a cycle, tell 15,000-odd bank people which ones, and let a small sum land where it is decisive. National Journal called it “the bankers’ non-super PAC super PAC.” It has outlived every other committee on this page.
Registered days after Evan McMullin announced against Mike Lee, with SkyMall founder Bob Worsley as treasurer. It spent $5.37 million on independent expenditures — $4.59 million of it against Lee. Then it raised nothing further, spent its last $10,397.92 winding down, and terminated. A committee built for exactly one race, which is what most of them are.
Formed in October 2023 to talk John Curtis into running for the Senate — it endorsed him and ran ads before he was a candidate, which a campaign committee could not have done because there was no campaign yet. It spent $5.34 million, ended with $0.00 on hand, and terminated.
The mechanics, sourced: the line-5 boxes and the 10-day clock come from the FEC’s instructions for Form 1; the vehicle definitions from Registering as a Super PAC andRegistering as a Hybrid PAC; the dollar figures from the 2025–2026 contribution limits, where the starred ones are indexed for inflation and change every odd year; the reporting windows from 24-hour reports. Checked 24 July 2026.The sale-or-use rule is 11 CFR 104.15, implementing 52 U.S.C. §30111(a)(4), which also carries the salting provision; the newspapers-and-books carve-out is in the regulation itself, and the analysis holding isFEC v. Political Contributions Data, Inc., 943 F.2d 190 (2d Cir. 1991). Checked 26 July 2026.The committees: every dollar figure for the Utah three is read straight off its FEC committee page —Friends of Traditional Banking,Put Utah First, andConservative Values for Utah — as are the independent-expenditure splits. The national figures are the widely reported cycle totals from FEC filings and OpenSecrets; donor attributions and the Lee–McMullin and Curtis–Staggs narratives come from contemporaneous reporting in the Salt Lake Tribune, Deseret News, KSL, and CNBC. Naming a committee here is a description of what it filed, not an endorsement or a complaint about it; the examples are picked from both parties and from none. This models the structure question and nothing else — it does not touch electioneering communications, joint fundraising, affiliation, personal use, or the state-by-state layer underneath a federal committee. It is a map of the published rules, not legal advice, and forming a political committee is a place where the difference matters. Runs entirely in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere.
The disclosure is the product. Every committee above files itemized reports, and the FEC publishes the lot as bulk data — which is how you go from “a Super PAC spent money here” to a number you can chart.