Hundreds of people are still donating to dormant political committees for Kari Lake and Tulsi Gabbard from what appear to be automatic, recurring credit and debit card payments the two MAGA stalwarts have kept accepting, a NOTUS analysis of federal campaign finance records indicates.

Since January 2025, more than 400 people have each donated money at least 10 times to the Kari Lake for Senate committee despite Lake losing her election in 2024 to now-Democratic Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, according to FEC records.

In all, Lake’s old committee has raised $365,000 and refunded about $9,000 worth of donations since January 2025, while Lake served — illegally, a federal court recently ruled — as head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media during much of President Donald Trump’s second term. Trump nominated Lake on May 11 to serve as U.S. ambassador to Jamaica.

Michalle Burns, an Arizona resident, had been making monthly donations of $50 to Lake’s defunct committee, according to FEC records. He told NOTUS that he canceled his payments after discovering the repeat charges.

Lake’s committee did not respond to a request for comment from NOTUS about its continued fundraising efforts.

At least 485 people have made 10 or more donations to Defend Freedom, the leadership PAC of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, from January 2025 through March 31, NOTUS’ analysis of FEC records indicates.

In all, Gabbard’s committee has taken in about $108,000 during this time, according to FEC records.

Anthony Pascuma, a donor who worked in the intelligence community for four decades, told NOTUS he was unaware that he was making monthly donations of just over $50 to Gabbard’s leadership PAC.

“Sometimes these things, you know, you click on something and buy a T-shirt and do a donation, and you’re not realizing that you’re signing up for the next year,” Pascuma told NOTUS.

Gabbard formed the PAC in March 2024 to support Republican candidates. The PAC contributed just over $20,000 of the $2.4 million it raised that year to several conservative candidates, including Trump, Lake and the House campaign of former National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent.

According to OpenSecrets, Gabbard’s PAC has not contributed to a campaign since 2024, despite continuing to take donations.

Gabbard’s spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, told NOTUS, “Since assuming her role as Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard has had no involvement with the Defend Freedom PAC and has not been informed of its activities.”

The vast majority of recurring donors to Lake’s and Gabbard’s dormant political committees are from people identified in FEC records as retirees. It’s unclear how many of these recurring donors intended to make such donations, and for those who continue to donate on a regular, automated basis, if they mean to do so.

Until recently, political committees using the leading political payment processing platforms — WinRed for Republicans, ActBlue for Democrats — often featured payment pages with prechecked boxes for opting into making monthly contributions, as opposed to a one-time contribution.

Earlier this decade, ActBlue and WinRed gave groups an option to automatically precheck recurring donation boxes, according to a report by The New York Times. Many donors had no idea they were making monthly contributions or forgot they had agreed to make ongoing payments — similar to forgetting about a recurring charge for an online streaming service or magazine subscription.

Several state attorneys general investigated the practice. The FEC asked Congress to ban it. And some members have sponsored bills that would do so, but they have yet to pass.

Trump’s 2020 campaign, for example, used prechecked donation boxes on online payment forms to add extra money to celebrate Trump’s birthday or increase donation frequency “for true patriots only.” The campaign ultimately refunded $122 million back to donors in 2020 alone, around 10% of what it raised in total, per The New York Times.

Al Jazeera reported that WinRed charged a Republican donor from Texas $90,000 on multiple credit cards. The donor only received a refund for the last 60 days of payments, totaling $59,000.

“That practice is extremely nefarious, it’s greedy, and it provides a horrible experience most likely for people with accessibility issues,” said Alexis Hancock, director of engineering at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit focused on digital rights and privacy.

Anyone making a political donation should be “vigilant when giving,” said Michael Beckel, director of money in politics reform at nonpartisan nonprofit group Issue One. “The only difference between a one-time contribution and recurring donations for months on end is often just whether a single box is clicked. If a donor isn’t attentive to the fine print and is defaulted into making recurring donations, they may not realize the full financial commitment they’ve made with a few keystrokes and clicks.”

Today on ActBlue, the automatically selected result for various campaign committees NOTUS examined is, “No, donate once.” Since 2021, the platform “requires groups using pre-set recurring forms to explicitly ask donors for recurring contributions immediately before the donor clicks the link to give.” For any recurring payment, ActBlue adds that groups must contact their team directly for approval.

WinRed did not immediately respond to a request for comment from NOTUS on its current policies. Its site states that as of March 28, it is still possible for users to enable recurring payments, although a note adds that weekly payments must be capped at a maximum of 12 weeks and requires groups to directly contact the WinRed team for approval.

Both groups’ tactics are attempts to shift away from what experts refer to as “dark patterns”: when solicitors precheck or coerce users into choosing a specific financial option.