There are still some laws barring coordination between campaigns and outside groups, and those laws carry criminal penalties. But there is an important loophole: There is no obvious prohibition against a prospective candidate’s speaking with aides about how a super PAC and a campaign could work in tandem before the F.E.C. has recognized him or her as a candidate. If there’s no campaign, there’s nobody to coordinate with, right?

And even after a candidacy is declared, strategists are free to leave campaigns for super PACs as long as they don’t communicate with the colleagues they are leaving behind for 120 days — the idea being that whatever strategic intelligence they take with them to the super PAC four months later will be too stale to use. But of course, nothing is keeping them and their campaign colleagues from gaming out different election scenarios, and how a super PAC could be most helpful in each of them, in advance — and many of the new crop of super PAC advisers know their candidates well enough to anticipate how they would want to react to a given situation.

Still, candidates may find that dispatching their best hands to helm super PACs has its downsides. For instance, Bush’s adviser Murphy is a reliable political sherpa on whom Bush has come to rely in moments of need; Bush won’t be able to turn to him for counsel if Murphy is at the super PAC. And if the fight for the 2016 Republican nomination proves as unstable and unpredictable as 2012’s — which was in part a consequence, as it happens, of unfettered super-PAC spending — there are likely to be plenty of campaign plot twists that no strategist could anticipate. “I can tell you, in 2012 we did not have any scenario for Herman Cain being a front-runner right before Thanksgiving,” says Carl Forti, an adviser who left the Romney camp to help run his Restore Our Future super PAC in 2011. But there is so much money available to outside groups now that it is worth the risk.

Are we stuck with this system? Is there any point in maintaining what scraps of campaign-finance regulation remain? I put the question to Fred Wertheimer, the longtime advocate for stricter campaign-finance regulations at the group Democracy 21. Wertheimer argued that the F.E.C. still has the legal grounds to crack down on candidate-affiliated super PACs. He pointed to language in the campaign-finance law that not only prohibits candidates from raising money outside the federal limits but also bars any “entity directly or indirectly established, financed, maintained or controlled by or acting on behalf” of the candidates from doing the same.

Super PACs formed by former aides and with the candidate’s express endorsement would certainly fall in the latter category, Wertheimer argued — including those that operated on behalf of Romney and Obama in 2012, none of which the F.E.C. punished. “What is going to happen is the system is going to be stretched and tested, and more blatantly violated because 2012 was Round 1, and there was no enforcement,” he told me. “Everyone is going to think they can get away with brazen violations of the law and other brazen activities in 2016.”

Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School who specializes in campaign finance, has argued that the only real solution is a new set of regulations that directly address the formation of candidate-specific super PACs. But this is a pretty grim proposition; the F.E.C. is so gridlocked that its members couldn’t even agree on whether to serve bagels or doughnuts in celebration of its 40th anniversary this year, as The Wall Street Journal reported last week. And Congress is, well, Congress. “In the current world,” Briffault conceded when we spoke last week, “it’s not going to happen — the F.E.C. is not going to pass any rules, and Congress is not going to pass any laws.”