The last time Tulsi Gabbard ran for anything, she was still a Democrat.
Yet, nearly seven years after Gabbard won her last race for Congress in 2018, her congressional committee is still sitting on money — and the Federal Election Committee wants to know what she plans to do with it.
According to the most recent FEC filing for Tulsi for Hawai’i in July, the campaign committee has more than $105,000 in leftover cash. For the third year in a row, the FEC has sent a letter to her campaign committee questioning the excess funds.
“Your most recent report discloses a significant amount of residual cash on hand. Please explain the committee’s intended use of the residual campaign funds,” the FEC wrote on Sept. 25. It did not accuse Gabbard’s committee of any legal violation.
Gabbard’s committee has yet to respond to this request. But it responded to identical FEC requests in 2023 and 2024 by saying that Gabbard — now President Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence — “has never and will never use campaign funds for personal use,” and that the committee intends to use the money for lawful purposes, such as “donations to charitable organizations” and transfers to other political party committees.
“The disbursements reported by the committee are for administrative needs regarding postage, bookkeeping, compliance, disbursement processing, donations, bank fees and refunds for the Tulsi for Hawai’i committee based on the permissible uses listed above,” the committee’s treasurer wrote in 2023.
But the campaign committee has engaged in very little activity over the past few years. It has occasionally made disbursements to pay for compliance services and a P.O. Box. Since October 2022, the committee has made modest disbursements to another Gabbard-connected political committee known as Our Freedom, Our Future. And most recently, the committee paid Blank Rome for legal consulting.
NOTUS recently reported that the congressional campaigns of lawmakers often stay open for years after the candidate has died or otherwise exited public service.
Although there is no deadline on how long a congressional or presidential committee can stay open, there are federal guidelines for how the money can be used — and NOTUS found multiple instances of the funds seemingly being misused by the lingering campaign committees of former lawmakers.
Gabbard, who became a Republican and endorsed Trump for president last year, did not respond to a request for comment for this story before press time.
Her committee must issue a response to the FEC by Oct. 30.
But the FEC will have little power to further press Gabbard: The agency is in the midst of a de facto shutdown for lack of commissioners, meaning it may send political committees warnings, but not advance investigations into those it suspects are violating campaign finance laws.