Andrew Yang said that he would give 1,000 dollars to 10 people each month. Is it legal?

Yang's advisers said on Thursday that they understood that the law on personal use only applied to a candidate and his campaign.

Payments of $ 1,000 would begin in the fall and would continue once a month for a year, whether or not Mr. Yang is in the presidential race, his campaign said. The advisors said that they would ask people to claim the dividends on the campaign website and select the recipients based on their requests.

Mr. Yang's campaign defined planned payments as an original idea never undertaken before by a presidential candidate. An expert in campaign finance law said that he did not remember a time when the FEC. had been forced to consider the legality of an allowance like that proposed by Mr. Yang.

"Andrew Yang's use of campaign funds to give" fans of freedom "to his supporters would push the boundaries of the campaign finance law," said Paul Seamus Ryan, vice president of Common Cause, a non-partisan organization that promotes government accountability. "This unprecedented use of campaign funds would raise a lot of new legal issues."

Yang's advisers raised a similar point on Thursday, noting that the unusual nature of the gift meant that the federal agencies had not yet made a final decision on its legality. However, they claimed that these agencies would find their arguments convincing.

Experts noted that each person who is paid by a campaign in exchange for goods and services, or both – like caterers at a campaign event – ends up cashing their pay check and uses the money to their personal expenses, by exercising a kind of "conversion" that the FCE does not prohibit. They suggested that, to reinforce his legal argument, Mr. Yang's campaign could eventually require dividend recipients to take on money-making tasks and then argue that payments are eligible because they represent compensation at market value. (Mr. Yang, however, has repeatedly said that the dividends he proposed would be distributed without any conditions.)

According to experts, under normal circumstances, Mr. Yang's campaign could have asked for an advisory opinion C.F., but the resignation of one of its members last month left the body with a quorum lower than the quorum. As a result, it is unable to take basic measures, including issuing opinions and imposing fines for violation of campaign funding.