With his 2024 presidential candidacy officially kicked into gear, Donald Trump would seem poised to enter the Republican nomination race a step ahead: his Pacs and committees boast a war chest of about $95m, enough to give pause to the Republican candidates jockeying against him.

But a scratch beneath the surface reveals a different reality. About $78m of the $95m cannot be directly used for Trump’s campaign, according to a Guardian analysis of the Trump fundraising web.

What’s more, there’s evidence the small-dollar donor stream that fueled his past runs is drying up. Some high-profile mega-donors have fled. And a campaign finance watchdog has filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) over Trump allegedly violating “soft money” laws as he appears to play a shell game with his cash.

“There are a lot of moving parts, but there are a lot of reasons to believe that Trump is struggling more than he has in recent years to raise money,” said Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Trump’s fundraising in recent years has raked in eye-popping sums. During the 2020 cycle he raised $882m, and another $500m since then. But the savings have been depleted by Trump spending on his own legal defenses, on Melania Trump’s personal designer, and on helping the January 6 rioters.

In recent years, the Trump team and its close allies have worked off an ever-expanding web of at least a dozen similarly named Pacs and committees. Typical examples: the “Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee” and the “Save America Joint Fundraising Committee”.

The most prolific entity over the current cycle has been the Save America leadership Pac, which raised about $111m and has about $21m left over post-midterm. But federal rules prohibit Trump from using leadership Pac funds for his campaign because leadership Pacs exist to support other candidates. It can, however, be used to support the large rallies that are a central campaign strategy.

Various Super Pacs hold another $57m, and though those can be used to support Trump’s campaign or attack his opponents, the Pacs legally cannot coordinate with the campaign.

In total, that means about $78m of the $95m on hand as of 28 November cannot be directly used for Trump’s campaign.

Still, that isn’t stopping the former president from trying to move money from leadership Pacs to Super Pacs via a legally questionable shell game. On 3 October, the Save America leadership Pac made a $20m contribution to Make America Great Again, Inc because the latter can spend more freely.

But that caught the attention of legal observers who say the move clearly violated “soft money” provisions of the Federal Election Campaign Act. On 14 November, the campaign finance watchdog Campaign Legal Center (CLC) filed a complaint with the FEC.

It alleges that Trump, based on multiple statements and fundraising totals, was already a presidential candidate when he made the transfer from the leadership Pac to the Super Pac.

“Therefore Trump violated federal law that prohibits that kind of soft money transfer,” said Saurav Ghosh, director of federal campaign finance reform for the CLC.

Moreover, Trump seems to be circumventing the Super Pac rules that prohibit coordination with his campaign.

“Super Pacs are nominally independent of the candidate, but with Trump it is heavy-quotes ‘independent’,” Ghosh said. “Clearly when you have a Super Pac like this, which is organized by allies and folks who worked on prior Trump campaigns, the independence is illusory.”

Trump has expressed his disdain for these rules, telling Fox News in an August 2021 interview that “campaign finance laws are extremely complicated and unbelievably stupid”. He also used the interview to strongly hint at his candidacy.

“The interview tells you all you need to know,” Ghosh said.

The new committee that will act as Trump’s official fundraiser is “Donald J Trump for President 2024”. Filling it with funds from the usual sources, however, may prove more difficult than in the past.

That’s because low-dollar donations that fueled previous campaigns – some of which were raised through questionable recurring payments plans – seem to be dwindling. The Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee has fused his Save America leadership Pac and official candidate committee.

The joint committee boasted about its $24m haul from July to September, but it spent $22m to get there, records later showed. All told, his Pac network ran $13m in the red over the three-month period leading up to the midterms, fuelling speculation of small-donor fatigue.

Moreover, the campaign showed $111m in receipts prior to the election, and is down to about $95m post election as its spending exceeds its fundraising.

“He captivates a huge population of small-dollar donors willing to keep giving their money to him,” Maguire said. “He still has the capacity to raise money off the Maga crowd, but the question is ‘Is that going to cool off? Is there enough in the till?’, and that remains to be seen.”

Among those defecting from Trump’s large-donor battalion are his top 2016 contributors, Robert and Rebekah Mercer, CNBC reported. The billionaires have instead donated to his likely primary rival, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis.

The hedge fund manager Ken Griffin, who threw around $67m in the midterms, has also backed DeSantis: “I’d like to think that the Republican party is ready to move on from somebody who has been for this party a three-time loser,” Griffin told Bloomberg’s New Economy Forum in September.

Meanwhile, Blackstone financier and CEO Stephen Schwarzman, who spent $34m in the midterms, expressed a similar sentiment.

“America does better when its leaders are rooted in today and tomorrow, not today and yesterday,” Schwarzman said in a statement. “It is time for the Republican party to turn to a new generation of leaders and I intend to support one of them in the presidential primaries.”

But DeSantis faces a similar predicament as Trump. He has raised an enormous amount of money through his state-level Pac, but that can’t be transferred to a federal campaign. Ghosh said he suspects DeSantis will try to transfer the money to a Super Pac, as Trump did.

That could prompt another complaint from the Campaign Legal Center, but it’s unlikely to go anywhere: with an equal number of Democratic and Republican commissioners, the agency has been stuck in partisan gridlock for years.

“These are serious violations because the federal system is designed to be insulated from spending outside of limits,” he said. “But the FEC rarely enforces the laws, and in the case of Trump they have a particularly awful track record, so I don’t expect that they’re going to change here. Obviously I hope they do as this is a clear violation, but we recognize what we’re up against.”