Alarm Bells about the Price of Power in Congress Ring Louder

Recently leaked internal Democratic Party documents confirm a concerning trend about which Issue One has been raising alarms for years: Both the Democratic and Republican parties lean on members of Congress to raise huge amounts of money and expect House members serving on influential committees to pay for their positions.

“While the phrase ‘party dues’ sounds innocuous, this system actually distorts lawmakers’ attention and priorities by forcing elected leaders onto a non-stop fundraising treadmill,” said Issue One Director of Money in Politics Reform Michael Beckel.

“When members of Congress are turned into telemarketers for the parties, they lose and so do the American people,” Beckel continued. “When lawmakers are expected to spend countless hours raising money, they have less time to focus on the job voters sent them to Washington to do, from helping constituents to crafting public policy to conducting oversight. Political parties should not be able to impose astronomical price tags on members of Congress.”

According to internal party documents published earlier this week by Axios, the fundraising expectations placed on influential lawmakers by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) have continued to soar.

For example, these new documents show that the top Democrats on the four most powerful committees in the U.S. House of Representatives — Appropriations, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services, and Ways and Means — are each expected to raise $1.86 million for the DCCC during the 2025-2026 election cycle.

That’s up from $1.5 million million each during the 2013-2014 election cycle, according to internal party documents published in 2014 by BuzzFeed News.

House Democrats who serve as ranking members of subcommittees on these four influential committees are expected to raise between $630,000 and $1.15 million for the DCCC during the 2025-2026 election cycle, according to the newly leaked documents. And ranking members on other subcommittees are typically expected to raise $630,000 — though some are expected to raise as much as $1.08 million.

As Issue One has highlighted in our “Price of Power” series since 2017 — see here (2025), here (2023), here (2021), here (2019), and here (2017) — both political parties are guilty of this practice, though no media outlets in recent years have obtained leaked copies of the party dues fundraising expectations set by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

Research published last year by Issue One showed that about $1 of every $6 spent between January 2023 and December 2024 by the typical campaign committee of top Democrats and Republicans on the four most influential House committees was transferred to the DCCC or NRCC. For some lawmakers, the percentage of transferred funds was even higher.

Members of Congress typically have four avenues to pay the party dues that are imposed upon them by the parties. Only three of these activities can be easily tracked in publicly available campaign finance filings.

1. Transfers from their official campaign committee to the DCCC/NRCC (which can have no size limits);
2. Transfers from their leadership PACs to the DCCC/NRCC (which have a limit of $105,000 per year, meaning up to $210,000 can be given during a two-year election cycle);
3. Directly raising money for the DCCC/NRCC through joint fundraising committees, which are frequently set up to benefit a lawmaker’s own campaign, leadership PAC, and the national party committee focused on House races; and
4. Directly raising money for the DCCC/NRCC, often by “dialing for dollars,” a practice in which lawmakers act like telemarketers by calling wealthy donors and are given credit for the funds they raise — something that is not knowable from public records.

Members of Congress can also curry favor with their parties by supporting vulnerable incumbents and candidates running in contested races, frequently directly donating to these politicians from their official campaign committees and/or leadership PACs.

Presently, the precise amounts that House Republicans are expected to raise is not known. But in 2017, then-Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO) revealed that the NRCC expected the top Republicans on the Appropriations, Energy and Commerce, Financial Services, and Ways and Means committees to each raise $1.2 million for the NRCC during the 2017-2018 election cycle.

Other House Republicans are generally expected to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for the NRCC.

In the wake of previous news coverage of leaked internal party dues documents, some House Republicans expressed outrage, including Reps. Tim Burchett (R-TN) and Thomas Massie (R-KY).

“Beltway reporters say ‘no big deal,’ yet constituents are always shocked to hear how committee seats are sold for campaign cash,” said Massie in 2019.

Added Burchett at the time: “This is a horribly corrupt system. Both parties need to clean the system up.”

In October 2022, the Freedom Caucus even warned soon-to-be-freshmen lawmakers that “if a Member neglects their ‘dues,’ or is perceived to be likely to neglect their dues, it will be reflected in your committee assignments.”

Just last month, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) told journalist Kyle Clark of 9News in Denver that one of the things that makes Congress so dysfunctional is lawmakers needing to raise campaign cash for plum committee seats.

The new leak of Democrats’ party dues fundraising expectations comes as some House Democrats are threatening to withhold their dues to the DCCC unless it stops intervening in primaries.