A Montana ballot initiative promising to strip dark money from elections is itself being bankrolled almost entirely by a so-called dark money organization — a glaring contradiction that even its own organizers can barely keep a straight face about.
The Montana Plan, known as Initiative 194, is being pushed by the Transparent Election Initiative, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit that is not required to disclose its donors. The initiative would prohibit political spending by corporations, nonprofits, trusts, trade associations and other “artificial persons” — yet the campaign promoting it has spent months hiding behind the very same shadowy legal structure it claims to be fighting against.
According to a Montana Free Press review of publicly available campaign finance filings, between the start of 2026 and late May, The Montana Plan received $112,000 in cash from TEI, the so-called dark money nonprofit arm that shields donor identities from public view. TEI also funneled nearly $60,000 in in-kind donations covering legal services, space rentals and supplies dating back to July of last year. Until late April, virtually every dollar financing the initiative flowed through TEI — leaving voters completely in the dark about who is actually pulling the strings behind this campaign.
Jeff Mangan, the former Montana Commissioner of Political Practices who architected the initiative, could not deny the contradiction when pressed by Montana Free Press. “The irony isn’t lost on me,” he told the outlet — a stunning admission from someone demanding financial transparency from everyone else. Tom Moore, a Washington D.C.-based fellow with the left-leaning Center for American Progress who helped develop the initiative, told the Free Press that he and Mangan “joked at the beginning that we should’ve named it Montana’s Last C4.”
This is precisely the kind of cynical, rules-for-thee-but-not-for-me political maneuvering that has eroded public trust in institutions. A former Democratic-aligned regulator, backed by a left-wing Washington think tank, is exploiting the very financial structures he claims to oppose in order to advance a measure that would effectively silence conservative nonprofits, trade associations and right-leaning advocacy groups across Montana. The anonymous donors bankrolling this crusade for transparency remain conveniently hidden from the public eye.
Montana’s current Commissioner of Political Practices, Chris Gallus, has taken notice and is now questioning whether TEI is appropriately registered as an incidental committee — a classification that does not require donor disclosure. Ballot issue committees, the category under which The Montana Plan falls, are legally required to publish full donor names and addresses. The entire arrangement appears carefully engineered to route money and services through TEI specifically to evade those legal disclosure requirements.
When confronted by Montana Free Press, Mangan defended the scheme, arguing that partial donor disclosures published on the TEI website — listing first names and last initials only — somehow constitute adequate transparency. He told the Free Press that full names are withheld to prevent donor information from being “scraped” and misused. That excuse rings hollow from a man who has made total financial transparency the centerpiece of his political crusade.
I-194 has attracted a roster of endorsers including former Republican Gov. Marc Racicot, former Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, former Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, and former Biden administration Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. Mangan told Montana Free Press that organizers have collected more than the 30,100 signatures needed to place the measure on November ballots, though the signatures still require certification by the Montana secretary of state.