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On Tuesday morning, the D.C.–area news publication Politico missed payroll. The publication chalked it up to “technical error,” and employees were paid later.
But in certain corners of the Elon Musk–owned social media platform X, this administrative matter required further investigation, and the investigators worked backward from the assumption of corruption. The work of these sleuths led them to a government database tracking spending that showed that Politico LLC had received a total of $8.2 million from the government in recent years and was being—in one MAGA influencer’s mind—“massively funded by USAID.” Hence, the thinking went, the company missed payroll because USAID had been gutted.
By Wednesday afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced during a briefing that she had been “made aware that USAID has funded media outlets like Politico. I can confirm that more than $8 million that has gone to subsidizing subscriptions will no longer be happening.” And early Thursday morning, President Donald Trump wrote a post, almost entirely in capital letters: “THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY!”
By Thursday afternoon, the White House had directed one major agency—the General Services Administration—to cancel all subscriptions to Politico and “every single media contract today for GSA only.”
So … let’s untangle this.
Politico and other major news organizations are not “massively funded” by USAID. Per (the very-fun-to-play-around-with) USASpending.gov, USAID has allocated $44,000 for two institutional subscriptions to E&E News, which is essentially an energy and environmental trade publication for professionals. (Politico purchased E&E several years ago.) Subscriptions are at the heart of this—and it’s no surprise that Politico’s government subscription revenue has gone up in recent years as the news media has shifted from advertising to subscription-based models, in the latest attempt to stave off looming death. This shift is why other outlets also show up as having received government “awards.” Politico’s earnings are especially higher, though, because of its negotiated contracts for Politico Pro, which sells a pricey trade-publication model for institutional stakeholders covering the minutiae of government business.
There’s a good chance that Republicans in government complaining about these subscriptions as “subsidies,” rather than as purchases of useful products for their offices, have spent federal funds on them as well.
According to the Washington Post, “last year, Republicans and committee offices paid for Politico’s products including $9,060 from the Office of the Speaker of the House, $84,000 from the House Committee on Agriculture, and $58,000 from the House Committee on Energy, according to government records,” while 38 Republicans in the House spent more than $300,000 on Politico subscriptions in 2024. The White House Office of the National Cyber Director just dropped $35,000 on a Pro subscription a couple of days ago. These subscriptions are not “subsidies” or signs of political support. People working in government like to have in-depth, up-to-the-minute information about what’s happening in various federal policy areas, because it helps them do their jobs.
Politico “has never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies—not one cent, ever, in 18 years,” its leaders wrote in a memo to staff Wednesday.
Nevertheless, it is true that taxpayer dollars were used on Politico, a publication that the right believes to be an unsalvageable left-wing rag. (Left-wingers often hold the opposite view of Politico.) This strikes me as an unremarkable fact. The government makes judgment calls each day about what to spend taxpayer dollars on. If it needs lumber, it spends taxpayer money on lumber. If it needs a uniquely secure limousine for the president to ride in, it spends taxpayer money on it. If its employees need niche information about what’s going on in any rulemaking process or procurement decision somewhere in government, it purchases access to a publication that provides that. Maybe those employees don’t really need these pricey subscriptions? OK, make the case that it’s not worth the money. But that’s a separate conversation from the one that assumes scandal from the get-go.
Another thread of criticism is that there’s a double standard for explicitly conservative outlets. “If any Republican were using federal tax dollars to pay for premium Daily Wire accounts, etc., the very press outlets defending the feds having massive numbers of premium Politico subscriptions would assail that,” conservative talk radio host Erick Erickson posted. Right-wing media personality Mike Cernovich, meanwhile, lamented, “Conservative and pro-America media outlets had to scrape by on ad network revenue, which was often cut off via illegal monopolistic behavior, while the left lived high on the hog via taxpayer subsidies in the form of ‘subscriptions’ to ‘pro services’ and ‘analysis.’ ”
Let’s set aside the questions of, again, whether Politico is “the left,” and which world he’s speaking about in which mainstream media—a struggling industry for decades—is living “high on the hog.” If an agency determined and could argue that a subscription to an explicitly conservative outlet was useful to its work, they should go for it. And there are right-leaning publications out there doing the work that an agency might want to subscribe to.
But let’s look at the Daily Wire’s homepage. As I write, it highlights its latest web show offerings, like The Ben Shapiro Show, the art for which is a Mortal Kombat riff showing fighter Trump up against a demonic blue donkey (the Democrats). There are other perfectly fine articles about Ozzy Osbourne announcing a final performance and Hillary Clinton criticizing DOGE, only to have the transportation secretary clap back at her. Shapiro has written about how Trump has unleashed a “mind-blowing Gaza plan.” The content game is what it is. But it still seems unnecessary for, say, the Department of the Interior to contract with the Daily Wire for premium access. Perhaps the Trump administration will disagree.
