For more than a decade now, corporations have been permitted to contribute virtually unlimited amounts of money to political ends. Though the fantasy propagated at the time of the 2010 Citizens United decision was that groups would be subject to a certain degree of transparency, in practice they report only a slim portion of their contributions to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), while much of the rest goes to super PACs, which don’t have the same reporting requirements. In 2024, dark money contributions to federal campaigns reached record highs: brand-new nonprofits and anonymous shell companies, whose donors are not disclosed, funneled $1.3 billion into super PACs in 2024 — double the previous record set in 2020.