Federal authorities have opened an investigation into the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA), the state's largest teachers union, over roughly $40 million in union funds that were used to support its own former president, Sean Spiller, in his 2025 Democratic campaign for governor, according to a report published on Friday, November 13, by Focal News, which cited four people with knowledge of the probe.
Source: Focal News
Three of those people said several individuals connected to Working New Jersey, a super PAC that promoted Spiller, have received subpoenas, and one person familiar with the investigation said at least one subpoena was issued by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of New Jersey. The four people were granted anonymity to discuss what the report called a politically sensitive matter.
Source: Focal News
The U.S. Attorney's Office in New Jersey has not confirmed or denied the investigation, no charges have been announced, and the specific legal violations, if any, that investigators are pursuing remain unclear, the report said. The NJEA has not publicly commented on the reported probe. Awaaz Punjab is reporting the investigation as a reported inquiry, not as a finding of wrongdoing by the union, Spiller or anyone else.
The money chain at the centre of the inquiry
According to the reporting and to court filings in a separate civil case, the money moved in a chain: from the NJEA to Garden State Forward, a Section 527 political organization that NJEA officers created, controlled and funded entirely with teachers' dues, and then onward — more than $40 million to the Working New Jersey super PAC and money also to Protecting Our Democracy, a now-shuttered organization. Working New Jersey, which was run by former NJEA officers, spent the funds on advertising and other expenses promoting Spiller in the June 2025 Democratic primary, while Spiller's own campaign raised and spent comparatively little.
Source: The Fairness Center — Dupont & Pocklembo v. NJEA & Spiller
The scale of the flows over a longer period is documented in public filings. ProPublica's 527 Explorer data, cited by NJ Business Daily, lists about $118 million in contributions from the NJEA to Garden State Forward since 2013; Garden State Forward received about $30.9 million in total contributions in 2025 and reported about $30.3 million in expenditures that year, and it transferred more than $40 million to Working New Jersey and $5 million to Protecting Our Democracy, according to ProPublica figures cited in that reporting.
Source: NJ Business Daily
Teachers sued first — in September 2025
Long before any reported federal interest, two New Jersey teachers took the union to court. Dr. Marie Dupont, a Roselle teacher, and Ann Marie Pocklembo, a Hamilton Township teacher for nearly 30 years, sued the NJEA and Spiller in New Jersey Superior Court in a case filed on September 30, 2025. They allege the union broke its membership contract, breached its fiduciary duty and made misrepresentations: their membership materials presented contributions to the union's PAC as optional and separate from regular dues, yet mandatory dues money, they say, was spent on politics anyway — including on the campaign of the man who was then the union's own president.
Source: The Fairness Center — Dupont & Pocklembo v. NJEA & Spiller
"A handful of union insiders spent $40 million of teachers' dues — including mine — on the union president's political ambitions. That's wrong, and I believe it's illegal," Dupont said; she has since resigned her union membership in protest. Pocklembo said: "I never agreed to bankroll a politician. It's an obvious conflict of interest when the union president benefits from backroom deals to fund his own campaign with members' money." These are the plaintiffs' allegations; the lawsuit seeks a ruling from the Superior Court and remains the civil track of the dispute.
Separately, the New Jersey Policy Institute (NJPI), a nonprofit think tank, filed complaints with the Internal Revenue Service and the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC). Its IRS complaint alleges the union failed to disclose its giving to Garden State Forward as political activity on federal tax forms; its ELEC complaint alleges the union exceeded New Jersey's campaign contribution limits by using two apparently related entities — NJEA PAC and Protecting Our Democracy, Inc. — to collectively donate twice the maximum limit to Spiller's campaign. NJPI president Rosemary Becchi said: "We believe that the New Jersey Education Association used a web of organizations to fund its president's run for governor and skirted federal tax law and state election law in the process."
Source: The Fairness Center — Dupont & Pocklembo v. NJEA & Spiller
On September 2, 2026, NJPI sent the IRS supplemental information pointing to a change in the union's own reporting: in its Form 990 for 2024, filed on July 14, 2026, the NJEA for the first time in roughly 14 years reported its contributions to Garden State Forward on Schedule C as political activity — more than $30 million classified that way in the latest filing, according to NJ Business Daily's review. NJPI argues the change reinforces that earlier years — in which, it says, more than $80 million in prior contributions were not reported as political activity — were misreported. The NJEA has offered no explanation for the change in the material reviewed for this report.
Source: New Jersey Policy Institute — IRS supplemental submission, Sept. 1, 2026
The U.S. Attorney's Office has neither confirmed nor denied a federal investigation; no charges have been announced against the NJEA, Spiller or anyone connected to Working New Jersey; the reported probe's targets and legal theories have not been made public; and the NJEA has not publicly commented on the reported subpoenas. Everything attributed to investigators in this story comes from anonymous sources in one published report and is labelled accordingly.
Why it matters — in New Jersey and beyond
The NJEA is the largest teachers union in New Jersey, and its members' dues come out of the pay of public-school teachers in every district in the state — including districts in Middlesex County, Jersey City and other communities with large South Asian and Punjabi populations, where thousands of diaspora families send their children to New Jersey public schools. The case therefore reaches well beyond one failed primary campaign: it asks who controls money collected from teachers as a condition of their work, how much of it can be routed through affiliated political groups, and what disclosure the law requires when a union's political spending benefits its own president.
What happens next: if the reported federal inquiry is active, subpoena recipients connected to Working New Jersey would be expected to produce records or testimony to federal investigators, a process that typically runs for months before any public step. The teachers' civil lawsuit continues separately in New Jersey Superior Court, and the IRS and ELEC complaints filed by NJPI remain parallel regulatory tracks. Any indictment, court ruling or formal response from the NJEA or Spiller would be a major new development, and Awaaz Punjab will update this story if one is announced.