Finance

Gen Zers are investing their way out of the 9-to-5

Published

1 year ago

August 12, 2024

Gen Zers are investing their way out of the 9-to-5

The finance guru Dave Ramsey famously said that if Americans wanted to build wealth, they should give up their morning coffee. But spend any time in certain corners of personal-finance Instagram and TikTok and you’ll see women indulging in sleek caffeinated beverages. They swirl whipped cream on their tall iced coffees, brew black-sesame-matcha lattes, and show off hot chocolate and pastries as they promote strategies to save, invest, and make the most of their credit-card points. These women talk openly about being rich and wanting to help other women become rich too.

One of those influencers is Tori Dunlap, the founder of a financial-education company called Her First 100K. She aspires to get as many young women as possible investing and to debunk the notion that in order to build wealth they need to deprive themselves of things they enjoy. In a video on Instagram, she considers Ramsey’s advice, then erupts into a scream. “It’s not the latte that’s keeping you from saving money,” she wrote in the caption. “It’s the systemic oppression.”

Just a handful of years ago, Dunlap, who was born in Tacoma, Washington, was working a job in marketing and dealing with a toxic boss. Thanks to an emergency fund she’d grown, she was able to quit and start focusing on building Her First 100K — named for Dunlap’s goal of amassing $100,000 in wealth, which she achieved by the time she was 25 by budgeting and investing.

Now, Dunlap, 30, has over 2 million followers on Instagram, hosts a top-rated US business podcast, and is the author of the best-selling book “Financial Feminist.” She also launched a platform called Treasury, which says it has helped women invest over $80 million in the stock market. Alongside creators like Mrs. Dow Jones, Simran Kaur, and Rachel Rodgers, Dunlap is a leader of a new wave of personal-finance education focused on teaching Gen Z and millennial women the fundamentals of earning, paying off debt, and investing, using a savvy blend of traditional financial advice, irreverent social commentary, and high-travel memes. You can think of it as financial education for the “lazy-girl job” generation — those who decry the corporate hustle and seek out low-stress jobs that don’t take over their lives. In one video, Kaur, the New Zealand-based creator of Girls That Invest, does her makeup in front of a mirror as she discusses how she’s using her investment earnings to build her own trust fund to live on. The message? You too can invest your way out of the 9-to-5 life.

If you ask these women, however, they’ll say the trend has nothing to do with being lazy and everything to do with giving women the tools they need to take control of their financial destiny. “We’re taking something very inaccessible and making it accessible,” Dunlap said. If men can use their financial savvy to get rich, then so can women. And in a world where many Gen Zers and millennials expect to be working well past retirement age, the advice is finding an eager audience.

On the first day of her first full-time job out of college in 2018, Haley Sacks was asked to fill out her health insurance and 401(k) contributions. “I really wanted to make a good impression, so that night I went home and did what any self-respecting millennial would do,” the New York native said. “I looked on YouTube for information, and I was really taken aback by what I found.”

Nearly all the financial-education content geared toward women focused on home-economics fare like saving and budgeting, she said. Meanwhile, the content she actually needed, which explained the fundamentals of investing, not only was “very dry” but seemed primarily made with a male audience in mind. “I couldn’t really find anyone who was teaching money the way that I wanted to learn it,” Sacks said. “So I became her.” Now, six years later, Sacks, who goes by Mrs. Dow Jones on social media, has 1 million followers on Instagram, where she posts pop-culture-inflected videos on topics like how to predict layoffs at your job and why the Cartier Love bracelets Kylie Jenner is famous for wearing may not be a good investment.

People like Sacks and Dunlap aren’t the first female celebrity personal-finance experts. Sacks pointed to Suze Orman — the pioneering personal-finance guru, author, and TV host — as someone who “walked so all of us could run.” But until recently, women looking to wrap their heads around the intricacies of high-interest savings accounts and low-cost index funds had scant few options that spoke directly to them. Personal-finance education in US high schools used to be rare — though it’s gotten better in the last few years with half of US states now mandating it. And women-specific financial-education literature tended to focus less on investing in real estate or negotiating a higher salary than on learning how to curb one’s spending on supposedly “frivolous” items like coffee, manicures, and haircuts. The message, Dunlap said, boiled down to: “Men get to be millionaires by making more money and being the fullest version of themselves. The way to become a millionaire for women is to basically hate your life.”

I couldn’t really find anyone who was teaching money the way that I wanted to learn it. So I became her.
Haley Sacks

On one level, these influencers are offering well-trodden financial advice packaged for a new audience: Dunlap’s book has sections on building an emergency fund, getting out of debt, and investing for retirement. She said women comprise 95% of her audience. “We joke that it’s largely girls, gays, and theys,” she said. Sacks, who calls herself a “zillennial finance expert,” said that her content is aimed at people of all genders but that women tend to gravitate to it because of the person who’s talking. “We all have the same message,” Sacks said. “It’s sort of like finding the right trainer who motivates you.”

These influencers do break from tradition in a few key ways. Citing high interest rates, rising home prices, and a booming stock market, Sacks and Dunlap have made the case for renting instead of buying. In “Financial Feminist,” Dunlap recommends readers focus on building a three- to six-month emergency fund before paying off debt so they’re prepared for a layoff or dangerous home situation. Sacks recommends young people job-hop to keep up with inflation and cost-of-living increases if necessary. “You should be making 15% more every single year,” she said. “And if you’re not making that at your current job, then you should change jobs.” (Research from the Economic Policy Institute indicates that since 2007 US employees have received an average wage increase of 3.9% a year.)

Rita Soledad Fernández Paulino, a California-based money coach and creator focused on women, BIPOC, and LGBTQ+ people, said their goal is to help people become “work-optional” by leveraging their investments. “I like the idea of everyone working because they want to and not because they have to,” they said.

Leah Sheppard, a professor of management and associate dean for equity and inclusion at Washington State University’s Carson College of Business, sees this wave of financial education as a reflection of an awareness among Gen Zers and millennials that the boomer-era version of the American dream — where you work your way up the ladder for 40 years at a single employer and put away enough to retire — no longer applies to them. “Young people are thinking, ‘When will I get to a place where I don’t really have to worry about money?’” she said. “If they’re thinking, ‘Traditional employment is not working well, I don’t want to start a business’ — well, what’s the other way? And it’s probably getting really smart about how you save money, taking the money that you are saving and investing it and building wealth.”

I like the idea of everyone working because they want to and not because they have to.
Rita Soledad Fernández Paulino

Sacks sees it as a matter of young people wanting to take the future into their own hands. “You have to be more self-reliant now than our parents ever had to be,” she said.

Kyla Scanlon, the author of the 2024 book “In This Economy?”, sees the interest in financial-education content on social media as symptomatic of a curiosity about alternative revenue streams, spurred by the rise of fintech apps like Robinhood and populist financial movements like crypto and GameStop. “People are looking at the market. They’re looking at different income sources, Airbnb, the gigification of everything — and then just how do you have passive income outside of traditional income?” Scanlon said.

For young men, this often takes the shape of riskier investments like sports gambling, crypto, and meme stocks. Young women, on the other hand, are turning to more tried-and-true tactics.

In a survey of 2,000 adults conducted in July 2023, Fidelity Investments found that Gen Z women were more likely to say they participated in the stock market than any other age group, with 71% of women ages 18 to 26 saying they had invested, compared with 63% of millennial women and 57% of boomer women. These figures dovetail with an uptick in the percentage of people under 35 who held stocks and retirement accounts in 2022 compared with 2019, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, though the Fed doesn’t break these figures down by gender.

Whether the goal is to retire early or to job-hop your way to a six-figure salary, this wave of financial advice departs from the “lean-in,” “girlboss” flavor of feminism that dominated conversations about women and work in the 2010s. “We’re just more disillusioned with corporate,” Dunlap said. “We’re more disillusioned with the way we make money.”

Instead, it’s advice for a generation of women who see their experiences reflected in memes like the “lazy-girl job.” “The lazy-girl thing is just like, ‘Oh, give me a little bit of rest in addition to my work,’” Dunlap said. “I think that’s completely reasonable.”

I can have wealth too. You can have wealth too. It’s not a you problem; it’s a we problem.
Rita Soledad Fernández Paulino

But talking about this stuff in public as a woman or queer person can be fraught. Dunlap said she gets “called every insulting thing you can call a woman on a daily basis” and has been on the receiving end of death threats. She said people aren’t used to seeing women talking in public about money, and especially not about being rich. “We have different expectations for how men and women should behave, especially around money,” she said. “Women shouldn’t want it. You should be grateful for the things you have.”

Other women BI spoke with said they faced harassment. “There’s a certain group of men who just don’t like women,” Scanlon said. But for the most part, the influencers stressed that their content was resonating with the people it was supposed to resonate with. “The comments section on any video is a mess, but it’s also the most supportive, lovely thing,” Dunlap said. “So many women, championing me, championing each other, championing themselves.”

The experts BI spoke with all had their own ways of describing the movement. Fernández Paulino said they see themself as belonging to a community of people who approach money and finance in a way that acknowledges the systemic issues that interfere with people’s wealth and wellness — such as the economic effects of structural racism and transphobia, or the fact that American women weren’t allowed to own a credit card or take out a mortgage in their own name until the 1970s. “For me, it’s like, I can have wealth too. You can have wealth too. It’s not a you problem; it’s a we problem,” they said.

Dunlap invented her own term to describe it: financial feminism. “It’s this idea of getting yourself financially to a point where you are stable, safe, and you have enough wealth to have options, and then using that wealth as a tool to make an impact,” she said. In other words, she wants to help women navigate the economic systems we’re all swimming in, so they can help other women by changing those systems from within.

Emilie Friedlander is a journalist and editor from Brooklyn, currently based in Philadelphia. She co-hosts The Culture Journalist, a podcast about culture in the age of platforms.

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Finance

3 ERP experts on AI’s impact on the finance department

Published

11 hours ago

December 8, 2025

Press Room

3 ERP experts on AI’s impact on the finance department

Finance departments have traditionally been risk-averse, which has often led them to lag in adopting new technologies. This writer recalls finance leaders insisting that their company’s financial data was too proprietary to ever move into the cloud. Yet, this caution hasn’t always been the norm. Finance was among the earliest adopters of personal computers. PC-based spreadsheets revolutionized how financial work was done, transforming processes once handled on paper with a Texas Instruments or HP calculator. Those manual methods were slow and error-prone, so it was a godsend when spreadsheets made financial analysis faster, easier and far more accurate.

In fact, PCs became a status symbol in accounting — public accounting firms proudly showed off that everyone had the latest PC. Geoffrey A. Moore, in “Crossing the Chasm,” writes about the role of Lotus 1-2-3 in enabling its delighted early adopters “to do something they had never been able to do before — what later became popularized as ‘what if’ analysis.”

The question now is whether generative and agentic AI will fundamentally reconfigure how finance is done. Bruce Harris, director of financial systems and intelligence at Torchy’s Tacos, put it well in a recent interview with me.

Related:Building an MCP server is easy, but getting it to work is a lot harder

“Every taco we sell is in our cloud data warehouse, and this data tells a story. By embracing agentic AI, we’re transforming finance from transactional to strategic,” he said. “Our agentic workflows automate the routine work, freeing our people to focus on insight, strategy, and growth. This isn’t about replacing talent — it’s about amplifying it.”

To explore this shift further, I spoke with experts at three ERP companies that are enabling agents for their finance customers:

Andrew Kershaw, group general manager for the office of the CFO, Workday
Joe Preston, vice president of product and design, Intuit
Victor Alvarez, product marketing manager for Joule, SAP

Their perspectives are surprising and deserving of wider attention — especially for CIOs, I would wager. For many organizations, CFOs have been the executives to whom IT reported — or, at minimum, one of IT’s most demanding and consequential internal customers. Countless CIOs have seen their lives upended by ERP implementations that dragged on for years, consuming budgets, attention and every available set of hands. These “all-hands” moments have repeatedly locked CIOs into long cycles of implementation and reimplementation.

What will be interesting to watch now is whether the shifts underway — particularly, finance’s push to apply AI to become leaner, more automated and more strategic — trigger another implementation cycle. Interestingly, if finance can reimagine its operating model, CIOs may find themselves at the center of a very different partnership with the CFO.

Related:Hot chips, cold feet: What happens when AI’s infrastructure outpaces demand?

From number crunchers to strategic advisors

Each of the ERP experts I spoke with made it clear that AI agents will automate transactional and compliance work, freeing finance professionals from manual tasks, including data entry, financial reconciliation and expense validation. With agentic AI, the boring, repetitive financial work is officially over — a welcome development for someone who had done financial analysis right after my first MBA. It was not my calling, but people who were STs in a Myers-Briggs assessment thrived in traditional accounting-type roles. What will this mean for those types?

AI agents will refine accounting and finance roles from transaction-heavy to insight-driven, shifting focus toward strategic analysis, decision support and business partnership. The hope, clearly, is that with the support of AI, finance teams can tackle previously “undone” work, unlock new productivity and enable faster, smarter business decisions.

Related:Make your own mandate: How CISOs can implement GenAI governance

Andrew Kershaw, group general manager for the office of the CFO, Workday

The AI opportunity for the CFO role

Here are excerpts from my discussions with Kershaw, Preston and Alavarez (lightly edited for clarity and brevity) on the importance and implications of applying AI to finance, starting with how AI will redefine the role of the CFO.

Andrew Kershaw, Workday: “Agents will accelerate the evolution of the CFO’s role, enabling [them to spend] the vast majority of their time on strategic opportunities across the business vs. managing transactional efficiency within their group. The core goal has always been the same: less time on transactions, more time on insights that drive the business forward. The value of agents lies in automating finance processes to help the CFOs and their teams both protect and grow value in the business.

“On the protection side, it’s about automating for greater accuracy, compliance and risk mitigation. On the growth side, it’s about unlocking insights to drive the business forward. By taking on tedious work that doesn’t require human judgment, agents free up teams to focus on strategy and high-value decisions. … This is how CFOs gain the credibility and capacity to stop spending time looking back and start spending it looking forward.

“It’s exciting because agents are moving beyond just surfacing insights to actually taking autonomous action, delving deeper into the data to understand variance or root cause of issues, then resolving an error or notifying the right people — effectively automating the workflow from insight to resolution.”

Joe Preston, Intuit: “While most financial tools give CFOs access to data … it’s challenging to cut through the noise and determine what’s valuable. Agentic AI identifies trends, connects and finds insights that are overlooked or hidden, helping CFOs understand not only where their business stands today but where it’s headed. Agents can provide a comprehensive approach to the financial management of growing, midmarket businesses with robust reporting, KPI analysis, and scenario planning and forecasting based on performance and peer benchmarking, helping CFOs and their finance teams make smart decisions to achieve their goals.”

Victor Alvarez, product marketing manager for Joule, SAP

A new division of labor in finance

AI agents are expanding automation by handling complex, multi-step and cross-functional workflows like invoice matching, cash collection and dispute resolution — while improving speed, accuracy and cash flow. With this said, our ERP experts noted that human expertise remains central.

Kershaw: “What sets AI agents apart is their ability to automate parts of finance that couldn’t be automated before. Past solutions struggled with ‘gray areas’ — tasks requiring judgment or cross-functional input. Now, agents handle these complex, insight-driven tasks, making finance workflows smoother and smarter. For example, in accounts payable, if an invoice doesn’t match a closed purchase order, agents can handle this autonomously, coordinating with other agents to resolve the issue, while still respecting the control environment.

“However, while agents are great at surfacing data and routing decisions, human judgment remains critical, especially for complex financial decisions. Agents will make it easier for decision-makers to act with confidence, but decisions that impact financial results require human oversight because someone needs to own the outcome. For example, AI can surface data for bonus accruals, but leadership must make the final call because executive alignment is required.”

Victor Alvarez, SAP: “Agents will handle common, multi-step workflows that require reasoning over data and business process context (e.g., invoice processing, dispute resolution, trade classification). They’ll also perform cross-functional workflows, such as cash collection involving finance, customer service and operations. Real-time decision support through recommending actions based on trusted, high-quality financial data is another significant benefit. For example, an accounts receivable agent doesn’t just automate receivables. It reasons through open items, balances, disputes, and dunning history to assess risk and prioritize follow-ups. It analyzes this context to flag high-risk receivables, recommends the next best actions and guides users with proactive, timely insights. Then it acts — initiating follow-ups, prompting responses and supporting resolution. This can result in less time spent managing overdue receivables, fewer write-offs through early risk detection and improvement in DSO to strengthen cash flow.”

Joe Preston, vice president of product and design, Intuit

Can finance learn to trust AI with its data?

AI complements — does not replace — human expertise, with people providing essential context, oversight, and ethical judgment in decision-making. Security, data integrity and privacy are paramount but will require finance leaders to understand how AI reaches conclusions to ensure accountability and compliance.

Kershaw: “Beyond the need for AI to act in an auditable, correct and repeatable manner, currently, the biggest hurdle for finance organizations isn’t understanding the value of AI — it’s reimagining what’s possible and adopting new ways of working. On reimagining possibilities, finance leaders aren’t used to AI agents providing instant, strategic recommendations instead of their having to manually track down information. Regarding new ways of working, finance teams must adapt to new workflows, including closer collaboration with IT.”

Preston: “Organizations need to keep in mind that AI complements human intelligence. While AI automates certain tasks and surfaces valuable information, human expertise is critical to ensure the right context and decision-making is applied. It’s also important for firms to remember that public AI tools may lack the secure environment needed when analyzing client data.”

Most exciting tasks to automate with AI agents?

The biggest challenge for finance leaders is not about recognizing AI’s value but reimagining what’s possible with AI. Here’s Kershaw’s take.

Kershaw: “Two areas: contracts and cost/profitability analysis. They are exciting because they represent the removal of very time-consuming and cumbersome activities that unlock incredible value.

“First, consider contracts. With a revenue contract agent, for example, AI automatically reads incoming contracts, sorts them by type and extracts all the critical data points like customer name, payment terms and total contract value. Crucially, the AI is continuously monitoring your entire portfolio and surfacing key insights through interactive dashboards, giving finance professionals insight into things like built-in rate increases tied to inflation that could automatically expand your revenue.

“Second, profitability isn’t just about one big number; it requires analyzing the true cost of operations for both direct and indirect costs and providing clear transparency into how shared resources are consumed. Agentic AI allows accountants and finance professionals to allocate indirect costs daily — such as management fees, utilities, IT and marketing — down to the individual outlet.”

Parting words

As each of the ERP experts made clear, finance organizations are on the precipice of significant change. For a profession developed as Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the change and disruption that it is about to experience is earth-shattering. In “Epic Disruptions: 11 Innovations That Shaped our Modern World,” Scott D. Anthony writes that “disruption is an engine of progress. By making the complicated simple and the expensive affordable, it transforms how we work, play, live and communicate.” Nowhere will this transformation be clearer than in accounting and finance as agentic AI takes hold.

In a world where the books of the company largely run themselves, it will be the more cerebral accounting and finance people who are in demand. These survivors will not only understand the books but also be able to make concrete suggestions on achieving business transformation.

Demonstrating this line of sight into business transformation will be a challenge similar to what happened to the CIO and their teams since the COVID-19 pandemic: the ones who survived underwent personal transformation, in many cases adopting a new mindset and skill set.

This time, the personal transformation is required by the CFO and their key reports in order to lead the next wave of change. And just like with CIOs and their teams in the wake of the pandemic, not everyone will be capable of making the change.

Finance

Delayed by traffic congestion, finance executive collapses at Lucknow airport, dies

Published

23 hours ago

December 7, 2025

Press Room

A 46-year-old finance executive died after collapsing at Chaudhary Charan Singh International Airport in Lucknow late on Friday, officials said on Sunday.

Police have said the cause of death of the man who collapsed at Lucknow airport will be confirmed after the autopsy report. (REPRESENTATIVE IMAGE)

Anup Kumar Pandey, employed with a multinational beverage corporation, suddenly fell ill in the airport’s parking area shortly after arriving to board a flight to Delhi. Airport staff rushed him to Lok Bandhu Hospital, where doctors declared him dead.

“Initial findings suggest a heart attack, but the exact cause will be confirmed after the autopsy report,” said Sarojini Nagar station house officer Ramdev Ram Prajapati. The autopsy was conducted on Sunday.

According to officials, Pandey left Kanpur for Lucknow by car but was delayed due to traffic congestion on the route to the airport.

Pandey, originally from Kalyanpur in Kanpur, was living in Bengaluru with his wife, son and daughter. He had travelled to Kanpur five days earlier to attend a cremation ceremony.

The family said the fear of missing his flight caused significant stress, and he was rushing inside the airport when his condition deteriorated, causing him to collapse. Police said Pandey was going to board an Air India flight and not IndiGo, which has been hit by a spate of cancellations in recent days.

“At about 10:10 hrs, a passenger named Anup Kumar Pandey, travelling by flight AI-1821, Lucknow to Delhi, suddenly lay down on the ground. The family was informed, and the post-mortem examination was conducted on Sunday after his relatives reached Lucknow,” said ACP Krishna Nagar Rajneesh Verma.

According to the family, he was scheduled to return to Bengaluru via Delhi on the 10.30pm flight.

Police arrived at the spot soon after and initiated legal formalities.

His brother Anil, who arrived from Kanpur, was present during the post-mortem.

With frequent flight cancellations over the weekend, Pandey’s wife and children are travelling from Bengaluru to Lucknow by road.

Finance

The Supreme Court Looks At Eliminating A 50-Year-Old Rule

Published

1 day ago

December 7, 2025

Press Room

The Supreme Court Looks At Eliminating A 50-Year-Old Rule

The Supreme Court has steadily loosened campaign finance rules in a series of decisions ever since Chief Justice John Roberts was confirmed in 2005. They will look to go further on Tuesday, when the court hears arguments in a case challenging the 50-year-old limits placed on coordinated spending between parties and candidates.

In NRSC v. Federal Election Commission, a Republican campaign committee is challenging limits placed on how much money political parties can spend in direct coordination with candidates. Those limits, which were put in place in the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, were intended as a companion to other rules on how much individuals can contribute to individual campaigns, preventing deep-pocketed contributors from using donations to parties as a work-around to those limits. The current limits on how much a party can spend in coordination with a specific candidate vary, from $63,600 for most House races up to $3.9 million for Senate races in California and even more for presidential candidates.

The case stems from Vice President JD Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio. During the primary, Vance’s fundraising lagged behind his GOP opponents and he relied on outside spending from billionaire Peter Thiel to push him over the top. He continued to struggle to raise money in the general election against Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan. (Vance eventually won.) And so, the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the chief political committee for GOP Senate candidates, and Vance brought suit to allow the party to spend unlimited sums in direct coordination with their candidate, arguing the coordination limits infringed on core First Amendment rights for political speech.

Lawyers for the NRSC argue that the limits in question block constitutionally protected political speech and do not prevent corruption or its appearance. Since “no one seriously claims that parties are trying to bribe their candidates,” the limits have been defended and upheld in the past as preventing “quid pro quo-by-circumvention,” the NRSC brief states. But this justification was ruled out-of-bounds in the court’s 2014 decision in McCutcheon v. FEC and so the party coordination limits should be struck down, the brief argues.

Indeed, preventing the circumvention of contribution limits is at the heart of the coordinated spending limits. If a political party can raise nearly $1 million from a single donor who wants to spend that on a particular candidate, the party can effectively contribute that $1 million — or more — to the candidate’s campaign by funding, for example, their advertisements as a coordinated expenditure. Since candidates are limited to raising $3,500 per election from a single donor, this would be a major way to circumvent those limits, which are at the heart of campaign finance regulation.

Vice President JD Vance brought suit alongside the National Republican Senatorial Committee to invalidate party coordination limits in a case stemming from his 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio.

Michael Conroy via Associated Press

Each lower court that heard the case rejected the NRSC’s arguments, following the Supreme Court’s 2001 precedent in FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee that upheld the limits. There, in a 5-4 decision written by then-Justice David Souter, the court ruled that “a party’s coordinated expenditures, unlike expenditures truly independent, may be restricted to minimize circumvention of contribution limits.” But the Supreme Court took up the case and now could upend campaign finance law yet again.

The court has upheld candidate contribution limits as constitutional since 1976, so it would be logical for them to prevent their circumvention — particularly as it has become easier for parties to raise the kind of large contributions that the candidate limits are meant to protect against. But that hasn’t held the court back in the past.

Since the court last heard a case challenging coordinated party spending limits, its composition has changed dramatically — and so has its campaign finance jurisprudence. In the years since 2001, the court’s conservative bloc has grown from five to six with no real moderates among them. And with the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor in 2006, the court lost its last member with any experience running for office or working on a political campaign.

It has also issued decision after decision gutting federal and state campaign finance laws. The most prominent of these is 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC, a decision that enabled corporations, unions and nonprofits to spend unlimited sums on independent campaign expenditures. But there are more, including the McCutcheon decision that invalidated aggregate contribution limits that put a cap on how much money a single donor could contribute in total in one election cycle.

These campaign finance decisions have largely been based on a repeated misunderstanding of how candidates and parties use money in elections. In each case, the court’s decisions loosening campaign finance restrictions have led to massive unintended — at least according to the court’s writings — consequences, such as an increase in undisclosed campaign money and illegal foreign donations and the circumvention of party contribution limits.

There’s no reason to think that won’t happen here.

“This case needs to be looked at in the context of the court’s now-two-decade run of substituting its own judgment for that of voters and Congress on campaign finance,” said Daniel Weiner, a campaign finance law expert for the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning nonprofit.

In Citizens United, then-Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, explained his decision by stating that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” That has proved wildly inaccurate as the corruption convictions of North Carolina insurance executive Greg Lindberg and former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder (R) and the 2015 indictment of then-Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) all involved corrupting contributions made through outside groups making independent expenditures. (Menendez was later convicted of accepting bribes and acting as a foreign agent in a separate case in 2024.)

The Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts has repeatedly loosened campaign finance restrictions — with many unintended consequences.

Kennedy also promised that, thanks to the internet and disclosure laws, corporations or others spending unlimited sums on independent expenditures could be held accountable by the public. But Citizens United enabled a radical decrease in the transparency of campaign spending as “dark money” nonprofits, which do not disclose their donors, became significant political spenders. These groups now make up a growing percentage of donors to super PACs. Though super PACs do have to disclose their donors, that does not trickle down to requiring disclosures of the donors to those donors — making the true origin of a large portion of election funding completely opaque.

Similarly, the notion that independent expenditures are truly independent from candidates or parties has proved to be completely inaccurate. The largest-spending outside groups are those directly connected to party leaders or staffed by close aides to the candidates they support. Candidates provide information, like b-roll and directions on what messages to use in advertising for outside groups, on their websites or surreptitiously on social media. And in 2024, the FEC ruled that supposedly independent groups may directly coordinate with parties and candidates on get-out-the-vote operations. Billionaire Elon Musk went on to do exactly this with the Trump campaign and earned a plum spot in the White House for his efforts.

In the McCutcheon case, the court’s decision was largely rooted in naive expectations of how political parties would act once aggregate limits were eliminated. The aggregate contribution limits capped the total amount a donor could give in any one election, among all political parties and candidates. The intent was, like the coordinated spending limits, to prevent corruption and work-arounds of the candidate limits.

A key argument in the case was that, absent the aggregate limits, political parties could create a joint fundraising committee that linked all 50 state parties together with the national party and allowed them to easily shift money donated in one state to support a candidate elsewhere. During oral arguments, Alito called these “wild hypotheticals.”

Then-Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority: “The Government provides no reason to believe that many state parties would willingly participate in a scheme to funnel money to another State’s candidates.”

But that’s exactly what happened. Beginning with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2016, every presidential campaign has created a super joint fundraising committee that then redirects contributions made to non-swing-state parties toward state parties in swing states or back to the national party.

While the party coordination limits seem to present less of an opportunity for the court to cause severe unintended consequences with another uninformed decision, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.

First and foremost, coordinated spending is done almost entirely in the form of advertising: The candidate designs an ad and plans when and where to run it, and the party foots the bill. But this could have unintended downstream consequences for television stations, which are required to provide candidates with the lowest unit price for campaign ads in the run-up to an election. Neither parties nor outside groups receive this benefit.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments in NRSC v. FEC on Tuesday.

If parties can suddenly subsidize candidate ads, television stations could be put under financial strain as they lose money that they previously received from higher charges on party advertising. This is an argument made by lawyers for the Democratic National Committee, who have entered the case to defend the limits.

“Broadcasters across the country will face significant increases in advertisements that purport to qualify for lowest unit rates, thereby inflicting a substantial financial strain upon them,” the DNC’s brief states.

This is likely to lead broadcasters to challenge rules that interpret coordinated spending as coming from the candidate and therefore receiving the lowest unit rate, according to Marc Elias, the lead lawyer for the DNC.

“This will have commercial impacts outside of the campaign finance world,” Elias said.

And then there are the unintended consequences that may flow within the campaign finance world.

By eliminating the aggregate limits, the McCutcheon decision opened the door for parties to collect massive contributions from single donors through super joint fundraising committees. In 2024, the maximum contribution to Vice President Kamala Harris’ joint fundraising committee was $929,600 for a single donor. Most of that money wound up with the Democratic National Committee or its state parties, which then circumvented contribution limits by routing that money to swing state committees.

If the court does end the coordinated spending limits, it will lead to a mass circumvention of the candidate limits — just as the McCutcheon decision did for party limits. And, as the unintended consequences of McCutcheon now flow into the NRSC case, so too would the circumvention of candidate limits lead toward their ultimate elimination.

There may be reasonable policy reasons to support ending or raising the coordinated spending limits, as the Brennan Center’s Weiner has advocated. In a world where single billionaires like Musk can spend unlimited amounts to directly coordinate with candidates through super PACs, it would be better for political parties, which are rooted in mass democracy and governance, to be on an equal, if not supreme, footing.

But that should be done by Congress, Weiner argues, not the Supreme Court — which time and time again has shown it does not understand how political campaigns work.

“The ultimate question is who should decide,” Weiner said. “I think it should be Congress that decides. We think of that as a fundamental principle. This is not something within the constitutional competence or, frankly, the expertise of the Supreme Court to make this call.”