# Sentinel Action Fund The super PAC that grew out of [[Heritage Action]] — the political arm of the [[Heritage Foundation]] — and has become the movement's electoral spending vehicle. Its founding president, [[Jessica Anderson]], was Heritage Action's executive director before leaving to run it full-time ahead of the 2024 cycle. > [!note] On the "separate" claim > Sentinel describes itself as **completely and legally separate** from the Heritage Foundation and Heritage Action, and as a matter of campaign-finance law that separation is real — a 501(c)(3), a 501(c)(4) and an independent-expenditure committee are different entities with different rules. The *personnel* are another matter: the fund was launched as Heritage Action's super PAC and is run by Heritage Action's former executive director. Both statements are true at once, and this page keeps them apart rather than collapsing one into the other. It reported raising **over $17.5 million** with its affiliated Right Vote effort across the 2024 election cycle — a figure the organization published itself and which is carried here as a self-report, not an FEC reconciliation. The FEC shows the Sentinel committee alone (C00811166) with **$37.1 million** in 2024-cycle receipts and $11.8 million in independent expenditures (checked 2026-10-04). The two figures cover different things and can't be reconciled from here. ## The voter-registration turn (2026) Ahead of the midterms, Sentinel moved from advertising *about candidates* to advertising *about registration*. Following President [[Donald Trump]]'s State of the Union address, it announced a "one-stop shop" registration page — a site where visitors check whether their registration is current in their state — and said it was spending **$650,000** to announce the page in a [[Fox News]] ad during the State of the Union coverage. Anderson framed the effort as keeping voter information away from what she called extremist Democrat organizations. ⭐ **The part that makes this a KB entry rather than a press release.** [[Judd Legum]] of *Popular Information* reported on 8 September 2026 that Sentinel's registration page is a **white-label of votesafe.org**, the site run by Elon Musk's [[America PAC]] — served at `register.sentinelactionfund.com`, the same underlying system that the [[America PAC]] page documents as a data-collection program. Legum reported the connection as previously unreported. > [!warning] Sourcing > The **technical identity** between Sentinel's page and votesafe.org rests on Legum's analysis alone. Sentinel's own release independently confirms that the page and the $650,000 Fox News buy exist, but does not describe who built or operates the page. The **$650,000** is likewise the organization's own number. Treat both as attributed reporting, not as receipts. ## Musk was a funder before he was a vendor [[Elon Musk]] gave Sentinel **$2,339,600 on Oct. 8, 2024** (FEC Schedule A), about 6% of its 2024-cycle receipts. So the votesafe.org white-label reported in 2026 is not two unrelated committees sharing a vendor. It is a recipient running its voter page on its donor's system. See [[Elon Musk Political Donations]]. ## Why it matters here Two separate things converge in this one page: 1. **The Heritage apparatus has an electoral arm that spends like a party committee** and, like [[America PAC]], performs a function the formal party used to own. 2. **Registration-checking is being built as shared private infrastructure.** If the white-label finding holds, a Heritage-lineage super PAC and a Musk-funded super PAC are running voter-facing "civic" pages off one system, collecting from the same funnel. That is the same *plumbing is the same plumbing* pattern the vault has tracked in vendor-sharing among Republican committees — with the difference that here the people entering data are voters, not donors, and the pretext is a public service. See [[Ready to Register]] for the third site reported to run on the same infrastructure, and the one that drew a formal state-election-board warning. ## See also - [[Heritage Action]] — the organization it was founded out of - [[Heritage Foundation]] — the parent institution of that lineage - [[Jessica Anderson]] — founding president - [[America PAC]] — the Musk super PAC whose votesafe.org system Sentinel's page is reported to run on - [[Ready to Register]] — the mailing operation reported to use the same infrastructure - [[Election Assistance Commission]] — the federal agency whose official portal these pages route around - [[Super PACs]] · [[Dark Money]] — the vehicle and the disclosure regime - [[2026 Midterm Elections]] — the cycle it is spending into ## FEC Form 24 activity — receipt date 2026-10-04 | Race | Amount | Direction | Vendor | Lines | |---|---|---|---|---| | [[MI-Sen-2026]] | **$144,130.31** | support [[Mike Rogers]] | RedZone Strategic LLC | 1 | | [[MI-Sen-2026]] | **$144,130.30** | oppose [[Abdul El-Sayed]] | RedZone Strategic LLC | 1 | | [[NH-Sen-2026]] | **$61,200.75** | oppose [[Chris Pappas]] | Storytellers Group LLC | 1 | **Total $349,461.36**, file **2016853**, expenditure date 2026-10-02, signed by **Nicholas Stoltzfus**. The Michigan pair splits to the cent — the signature of one buy allocated across both sides of a race. > [!important] Its signer also signed a Maine-branded committee the same day > **Nicholas Stoltzfus** signed [[Lead Maine Committee]]'s Form 24 (file **2016855**) at 20:13:25 on > 2026-10-04, five minutes and fifty-three seconds after this one at 20:07:32. Lead Maine Committee is a > Bangor-addressed committee spending against [[Troy Jackson]] in [[ME-Sen-2026]] — one of three > Maine-branded committees in that race, each with a different outside link. See > [[State-Branded Super PAC Template]]. > > A shared signer is a compliance-vendor fact before it is anything else, and nothing in the filings > establishes coordination or shared funding. The aggregate columns ($2,517,584.36 for Michigan, $685,897.52 for New Hampshire) are **not** race or committee totals. Sources: `docquery.fec.gov/dcdev/posted/2016853.fec` · `docquery.fec.gov/dcdev/posted/2016855.fec`