Harrison Butker’s PAC is low on cash. But so far, none has gone to candidates
In the weeks before the 2024 election, Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker stepped into politics, launching a political action committee designed to promote politicians who fight for conservative Christian values.
But Butker’s committee appears to have fallen short of that goal.
The Upright PAC raised just $4,023 in the first six months of 2025 and ended June with less than $1,800 in cash on hand, according to the PAC’s most recent campaign finance records.
Even more remarkable, none of the money Butker’s PAC spent between January and June went to Republican candidates. The PAC spent $7,422 during that period, with most of the money going to a political consultant who’s listed as an employee of a company Butker co-founded called MDKeller.
Butker launched the PAC last year while on the campaign trail with U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican. The announcement came just months after the Chiefs kicker attracted national controversy for his commencement speech in which he implied that women graduating from college should be more excited to have a family than for their careers.
The PAC, formed last September and announced the next month, still appears to be active with a website that solicits donations. Butker has also remained connected to politics and spoke at a ceremony with President Donald Trump late last month.
“We’re seeing our values under attack every day. In our schools, in the media, and even from our own government,” the PACs website says. “But we have a chance to fight back and reclaim the traditional values that have made this country great. That’s why UPRIGHT PAC was founded.”
Butker’s PAC operates as a “hybrid PAC” or “Carey committee,” meaning that it may raise limited amounts of money for political campaigns and committees or raise unlimited amounts of money to promote candidates as long as the money doesn’t directly go to the candidate, according to OpenSecrets, which first reported the PAC’s most recent report.
But the PAC, so far, does not appear to have benefitted candidates either directly or indirectly. The spending drew sharp criticism from the spokesperson for the Missouri Democratic Party, who called the PAC “the latest of many grift operations to pop up that have been plaguing politics on both sides of the aisle in recent election cycles.”
“These groups are unaccountable to transparency, overpromise, underdeliver, and leave working campaigns scrambling for resources,” said spokesperson Chelsea Rodriguez.
Representatives for Butker and the PAC did not immediately respond to requests for comment for this story. Representatives from the Missouri Republican Party also did not respond.
The PAC also raised eyebrows among campaign finance experts who spoke with The Star about the spending last year.
A government watchdog group called The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington flagged Upright PAC’s spending on social media last year. Jordan Libowitz, their communications director, told The Star at the time that he believed Butker was “ripped off as badly as anyone’s ever gotten ripped off” or that he was padding the pockets of political consultants.
“When you sign a contract with a fundraising consultant, it says what percentage of the money you’re paying. So they had to know how much was coming out,” Libowitz said. “You have to ask them, what were they actually doing, and what were they planning on doing, because there’s no money spent on really anything else.”
The most recent campaign finance report shows that $4,500 of the PAC’s spending went to a political consultant named Daniel Ambuul. That person is described as a senior operations specialist on the website of MDKeller, a holding company co-founded by Butker that oversees other businesses.
Representatives for MDKeller did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While it’s unclear how the money was used, some consulting firms offer services, such as tracking donors and building social media content.
For Rodriguez, with the state Democratic Party, PACs similar to Butker’s have become a trend in politics since the 2010 landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision called Citizen’s United that effectively allows unlimited political spending by corporations.
“Butker’s PAC is no different, another vanity project using political outrage and conservative values as a branding tool to build his own profile,” she said.
This story was originally published August 7, 2025 at 1:18 PM.
