By opting out, Dean and Kerry freed themselves of the program's $45 million primary spending limit but turned away monthly government campaign checks.
Those checks won't prove a very lucrative financial lifeline for participating candidates, however, even as they try to make their cash stretch through a monthlong crunch of more than a dozen primaries.
The departures of Dean, Kerry and President Bush from the taxpayer-financed program left it flush enough to give participants their full monthly payment when the first checks went out in early January.
But with little time to replenish itself from tax returns, the program now has only enough cash to give candidates roughly 43 cents to 45 cents of each dollar they're entitled to when new checks go out Monday.
Before word of the shortfall, Dennis Kucinich had been expecting $2.4 million in his February check; Wesley Clark, $1.4 million; Joe Lieberman, about $389,000; and John Edwards, about $302,000.
Candidates will have to take out loans if they want to make up the difference until the program can afford to pay their full shares.
The program matches the first $250 of each private campaign donation, up to about $18.7 million per candidate. Taxpayers can check a box on their income-tax returns to direct $3 to it at no cost to themselves.
In another campaign finance development, Federal Election Commission lawyers have weighed in on how they think the nation's broad new ban on the use of "soft money" - corporate, union and unlimited donations - for federal election activity affects tax-exempt political groups.
They are recommending that the FEC find such groups must use "hard money" - limited contributions from individuals and political action committees - when funding ads, mailings or phone banks that name only a federal candidate and promote or attack that candidate.
Get-out-the-vote messages that support or oppose a federal candidate and also mention nonfederal candidates, or those that do not mention a particular federal candidate, can be paid for with a mix of hard and soft money, they said.
The commission is expected to consider the recommendation next week. FEC lawyers made it after a new pro-Republican group formed to counter the soft money efforts of Democratic anti-Bush groups sought guidance on how the law would affect its activities.
