Matt Gaetz’s Campaign Finances Don’t Add Up

Former Congressman Matt Gaetz’s campaign committee has reported spending millions of dollars on Stripe Inc.’s payment-processing services in recent years, though it now says that those funds ultimately went somewhere else — and campaign-finance watchers say that’s a problem.

During the 2024 election cycle, Gaetz’s principal campaign committee, Friends of Matt Gaetz, said in Federal Election Commission filings that it had paid a total of $1.2 million in “e-merchant fees” to Stripe, a San Francisco-based financial-services company.

The sum is equivalent to about 19% of all contributions the campaign took in during the period, the filings show.

Such outlays far exceed election-season norms. A Bloomberg News analysis of FEC filings by candidates for federal office this year found that campaign committees typically reported spending between 1% and 4% of their contributions on payment processing. Most campaigns report payment-processing expenses separately from other vendor costs.

Gaetz has long disclosed comparatively high spending on financial-processing fees, FEC filings show. Over the past three election cycles, his campaigns have reported paying Stripe $2.5 million — or 13% of their fundraising haul over that time. That is a greater share of donations than any other candidate or committee has reported paying Stripe since 2020. Gaetz was first elected to Congress in 2016.

When a credit card is used for a transaction, including for political donations, it can generate a small processing fee to cover cos…  ts. For well-funded campaigns, those costs can add up. During the 2020 campaign, for instance, Trump’s Make America Great Again Committee reported paying Stripe over $5.1 million in fees, according to FEC filings. However, those fees accounted for less than 1% of the nearly $900 million raised by Trump’s campaign over the four-year period.

Bloomberg’s initial analysis of the FEC filings found that the Gaetz campaign committee’s reported payments to Stripe were many times what it was likely to have owed the company for its services. According to its website, Stripe typically charges 2.9% of the donation plus 30 cents per transaction.

Stripe handles more than $1 trillion in transactions a year.