One man’s campaign finance operation in Wisconsin exemplifies the opacity of the US political funding system In the summer of 2024, a non-profit called the Green Dragon Coalition wired the last $20,000 of a $445,000 grant to a Super Pac . Its tax return for that year would describe the purpose of the transfer as “educational”. The same…
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Wisconsin nonprofit's 'educational' $20,000 transfer and Anduril's $6.6 billion shipyard use the same donor-anonymity trick
As it ran on the front
The paperwork says $445,000. The reconciliation says something else.
A Wisconsin nonprofit called the Green Dragon Coalition filed a grant of $445,000 for 2024. The last $20,000 of it moved in the summer of that year, wired to a Super PAC, filed under one word: "educational." The same day the wire landed, Federal Election Commission records show, that Super PAC spent $8,000 attacking Celeste Maloy, the Republican congresswoman from Utah's second district, four days before the primary that would decide whether she kept the seat. By then the PAC had already spent more than $400,000 promoting her challenger, Colby Jenkins, a candidate running to her right with the backing of Senator Mike Lee. Run the ledger: one grant, one transfer, one primary, two candidates, and one donor name that appears on neither filing.…
…(cont) Two years later, on October 6, 2026, the same structure shows up wearing a bigger number. The federal government announced $6.6 billion for a shipyard in Baltimore, partly funded by taxpayers, owned by the defense firm Anduril. Anduril was founded by Palmer Luckey, a major Republican fundraiser who has hosted campaign events for the party he funds. It is not on the Green Dragon filing, and it is not required to be on the shipyard filing either. The mechanism that kept a donor's name off a $445,000 education grant is the same mechanism that keeps a donor's name off a $6.6 billion defense contract: route it through an entity whose stated purpose is something else.
Reconcile the two numbers side by side, hon. $20,000 moved through a cutout to attack a sitting congresswoman in her own party's primary. $6.6 billion moved through a company to a donor who raised the money that helped elect the people who signed the contract. The gap between those two filings is not a clerical error. It is the distance the law currently allows between a name and a dollar, and in Wisconsin, in Utah, and now in Baltimore, the same handful of structures are covering it. The paperwork did not change at all.
“The same shell game that laundered twenty grand into an attack ad on a Republican's own primary runs the paperwork on a six-point-six-billion-dollar shipyard contract. Same blank space where the donor's name is supposed to go, just more zeros. The people with the power to close that gap got their seats through it.”
“Look, disclosure rules protect donors from harassment, that's the whole point of these vehicles — both parties use them, it's standard practice, not a Republican story. Though I guess in this case it's Republican money attacking a sitting Republican, so it's not exactly a both-sides thing. The privacy protects the donor from... accountability, I mean scrutiny, I mean — did I say accountability? That's not what I meant.”
The receipts
· Trump announces $6.6bn defense shipyard owned by top Republican donor’s firm from the morgue, 6 Oct 2026
· Jeffries says Republicans are mismanaging their money in New York House races from the morgue, 8 Oct 2026
· Republican super PAC shifts money from North Carolina to Kansas from the morgue, 2 Oct 2026
· GOP senators push back on Trump’s taxpayer-funded ad from the morgue, 29 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.