Our Heritage Matters registered with the Federal Election Commission on Oct. 15 and started spending five days later. By Oct. 29 it had put $1.2 million into 10 House and Senate races, according to CNBC’s analysis of FEC filings. Nobody outside the group knows who paid for it. Oct. 15 was also the deadline for the periodic report that would have named its donors, so the group’s first such filing isn’t due until Dec. 3 — a month after polls close.
That gap between forming, spending and disclosing is not a loophole anyone is exploiting quietly. It is the organizing principle of 22 super PACs that registered with the FEC in the final 10 weeks before the 2026 midterms and each spent at least $1 million on congressional races. Together they reported roughly $637 million in independent expenditures by Oct. 29, about one-sixth of all such spending in House and Senate races this cycle, per CNBC’s count.
The mechanism: two clocks, one of them broken for voters
Federal election law runs two separate reporting clocks for a super PAC, and they move at very different speeds. Spending on ads for or against a specific candidate — an independent expenditure — has to be reported within 48 hours, or within 24 hours inside the final 20 days before the election. That clock is tight by design: voters are supposed to see who is attacking whom, fast. Donors are a different matter. A super PAC discloses who gave it money through periodic reports — monthly or quarterly filings, plus pre-election reports — on a schedule set months in advance, with no acceleration tied to how close the election is.
A PAC that forms after the last pre-election filing deadline can spend tens of millions of dollars, show up correctly in the fast 24/48-hour reports naming which candidates it’s helping or hurting, and still not have to reveal a single donor until its next regular report comes due — which, done right, lands after Election Day. “The reason for this is almost entirely to avoid disclosure, even if just temporarily,” Michael Kang, a Northwestern Pritzker School of Law professor who studies campaign finance, told CNBC. The FEC’s own compliance guidance confirms the asymmetry: a committee’s 24- or 48-hour independent-expenditure reports do not require it to name the contributors behind that specific spending; only the periodic reports do.
| From | To | How |
|---|---|---|
| Elon Musk ($158M, two gifts) | Senate Leadership Fund | Sept. 9 & 23 |
| Senate Leadership Fund | Texas PAC (formed Aug. 28) | transferred next day |
| Texas PAC (formed Aug. 28) | Ads for Ken Paxton | |
| GEO Group subsidiary | MAGA Inc. | donation |
| MAGA Inc. | No Going Back PAC (formed Sept. 1) | $200M |
| No Going Back PAC (formed Sept. 1) | Ads vs. Democrats |
Based on CNBC analysis of FEC filings
The diagram shows the pattern CNBC found nine times among the 22 groups: an established national super PAC — one with a donor list already public or already controversial — wires money to a newly formed, locally branded PAC, which then runs the ads. The national group’s name shows up on the fast independent-expenditure reports as the payer of record; its own donors surface later, if at all, on a separate periodic filing that nobody is required to cross-reference against the spending in real time.
The growth is not a two-point trend
The caution engineers apply to any trend drawn from two data points doesn’t survive contact with these numbers. At the same point in the 2022 midterms, five comparable late-forming super PACs had spent about $18 million combined; in 2018, three groups had spent about $12 million, per CNBC. The number of such groups has more than quadrupled since 2022 — five to 22 — while their combined spending has grown nearly 35-fold, from $18 million to $637 million. Both of the last two presidential cycles, with far larger total campaign spending overall, saw comparable late-forming groups spend less than $50 million combined on congressional races, in 2020 and again in 2024.
| Spending ($M) | |
|---|---|
| 2018 midterm | 12 |
| 2020 presidential | 50 |
| 2022 midterm | 18 |
| 2024 presidential | 50 |
| 2026 midterm | 637 |
Source: CNBC analysis of FEC filings. 2020 and 2024 figures are reported as 'less than $50 million'; shown here as the upper bound
Among the 22 groups, 18 began spending within 30 days of launching, and almost all started spending before filing the first periodic report that would show where the money came from, CNBC found. The tactic is bipartisan, though not evenly so: PACs with Republican ties have spent roughly twice what Democratic-linked ones have. As a share of all independent expenditures in congressional races, these late starters went from under 2% at the same point in 2018 and 2022 to more than 22% this cycle.
Who’s behind the biggest ones
No Going Back PAC registered Sept. 1 and began spending three days later. It shares a treasurer, address and phone number with MAGA Inc., President Trump’s main super PAC, and its FEC committee record shows total receipts of $200,080,483.86 through Oct. 14 — $200 million of it a single transfer from another committee, against just $80,483.86 in itemized individual contributions. Its first financial report, due Oct. 20, arrived more than six weeks after the spending began. By Oct. 29 it had spent roughly $187.8 million; Thursday’s figures put the total at $242.2 million.
On the Republican side, Texas PAC formed Aug. 28 to back Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senate bid. Its sole donor, per the quarterly filing, was Elon Musk, who gave the Senate Leadership Fund $75 million on Sept. 9 and $83 million on Sept. 23; SLF forwarded matching amounts to Texas PAC the following day each time, The Hill reported. Musk’s role wasn’t public until Oct. 12, a month after the spending started. By Oct. 29, Texas PAC had spent about $181.6 million, per CNBC — making it, with No Going Back, one of two groups that together account for roughly two-thirds of all spending by the 22 million-dollar PACs identified. Musk has given $446 million to the 2026 midterms overall, and this Texas transfer alone accounts for more than a third of it.
Exclude those two giants and the remaining 20 groups still spent nearly 12 times what comparable late-forming super PACs spent at the same point in 2022 — so the surge isn’t just two billionaire-scale outliers skewing an otherwise flat picture.
On the Democratic side, Lower Costs Now formed Sept. 10, disclosed a Future Forward PAC affiliation on paper, and began spending in Senate races 19 days later. Its first regular report, filed Oct. 15, showed Senate Majority PAC — the main Senate Democratic super PAC — had given it $23 million; by Thursday it had reported about $75.5 million in independent expenditures across eight Senate races, including Iowa, Texas, Kansas and Ohio. Texas Forever, formed Sept. 24 to help Democratic Senate nominee James Talarico, named Senate Majority PAC as an affiliate from its first filing — a transparency the Republican-linked groups in this analysis generally did not match — and had spent about $27.5 million by Thursday.
Fragmentation as a feature
Fourteen of the 22 million-dollar groups spent every dollar in a single race. The Maine Standard formed Sept. 11, began spending five days later, and has put $8.2 million entirely into opposing Democrat Troy Jackson in Maine’s Senate contest. The Cornhusker Majority formed Sept. 10, started spending Sept. 16, and has spent about $7.1 million almost entirely against independent Dan Osborn in Nebraska, where Osborn is challenging Republican Sen. Pete Ricketts. Both groups’ Oct. 15 filings traced back to the same funder, the Senate Leadership Fund — a connection invisible until that filing date.
A locally branded PAC doesn’t necessarily hide where the money comes from, but it fragments the picture. Instead of seeing one national organization spending tens of millions of dollars across the country, voters see a series of different groups operating race by race.
That’s Hilary Braseth, executive director of OpenSecrets, describing the effect to CNBC: not concealment exactly, but a kind of distributed obfuscation, where each local-sounding name resets a voter’s priors about scale and origin even when the underlying check-writer is the same national committee seen in three other states. Saurav Ghosh of the Campaign Legal Center put the incentive more bluntly: these groups are “a vehicle designed to emerge from nowhere and spend a bunch of money on an election” before anyone can learn who supplied it or why.
None of this requires breaking a rule. The FEC’s reporting deadlines are fixed calendar dates, not a response to how close an election is, and a PAC that times its birth to land after the last pre-election filing window is using the calendar as designed, not evading it. Whether that counts as the system working is Kang’s closing point: groups don’t always need lasting anonymity, just enough of it to get past a single Tuesday — or, as he put it, to “build a reputation for the players inside the system” while staying unaccountable for one election cycle at a time. The next test of that reputation comes when the periodic reports land in December and January, and reporters start matching the names on those filings against the ads that already ran.