The fallout over President Donald Trump pausing the operations of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for review has continued to expand, with legacy media outlets, including POLITICO, having been found to benefit. As part of these efforts to look out for the American taxpayer, the Trump administration is putting an end to that, though fellow media outlets aren't too thrilled about such a move.
While taking a question during Wednesday's White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called out POLITICO and noted that the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is putting an end to it.
.@PressSec on Legacy Media outlets receiving funding from USAID:
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) February 5, 2025
"The more than 8 million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to @politico... will no longer be happening. The @DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now." pic.twitter.com/wjvSWWr1kA
🚨 BREAKING: State Dept. leadership has verified funding for Politico and AP was cancelled today - via @DOGE
— Publius (@OcrazioCornPop) February 6, 2025
Politico and The Associated Press have both received Millions of dollars in Govt funding over the years.
Elon Musk vowed to get rid of it:
"Not for long. This is… pic.twitter.com/2QCagyaSV2
CNN responded by claiming that same night that the White House was depending on "a false right-wing conspiracy theory" that was spreading.
The explanation from CNN doesn't paint their outlet, nor POLITICO, in any kind of an improved light, though [emphasis added]:
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, responding Wednesday to a question about a right-wing conspiracy theory, announced that the federal government would cancel $8 million worth of Politico subscriptions.
Leavitt elevated a bogus claim spreading on social media that Politico and the Associated Press for years received millions of dollars from the US Agency for International Development, which President Donald Trump and Elon Musk have targeted by placing staff on leave. In reality, the payments represented the whole of the federal government’s subscriptions to the news outlets’ services. All federal agencies combined spent $8.2 million last year on Politico Pro, according to USASpending.gov.
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But as reporters quickly pointed out in response to false statements on social media, the payments are not exclusively USAID funds.
The piece also included statements from the outlet, as well as the Associated Press:
Politico’s leaders, Goli Sheikholeslami and John Harris in a memo to staff Wednesday, denied that the media company has received any funding from the government.
“POLITICO has never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies — not one cent, ever, in 18 years,” the news outlet’s leaders wrote in the memo.
The media company acknowledged government agencies subscribe to its pro service, just like corporations do. “The value of this journalism is clear, as evidenced by our subscription re-enlistment rates,” Politico’s leaders said. The news outlet said it welcomes conversations with government subscribers “and are confident that most will see the continued value.”
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In a statement, the AP said that the federal government has “long been an AP customer — through both Democratic and Republican administrations.”
“It licenses AP’s nonpartisan journalism, just like thousands of news outlets and customers around the world,” the AP said. “It’s quite common for governments to have contracts with news organizations for their content.”
That the funds are not "exclusively" from USAID and are for "subscriptions" shouldn't necessarily matter, though. And, when it comes to the AP touting its "nonpartisan journalism," there have been issues with outlets and others covering up for Democratic campaigns and administrations.
Why does Politico care if it’s false?
— Brent Scher (@BrentScher) February 6, 2025
CNN wasn't the only outlet to take such umbrage with what Leavitt spoke about from the podium. "No, Politico Did Not Receive ‘Substantial Funds’ from USAID," a headline from The Dispatch claimed. "Trump Amplifies Conspiracy Theory Over Payments to Politico," read another headline from The New York Times.
From the very first sentence, The Dispatch communicates its bias, as it refers to the USAID money as "humanitarian assistance" that the Trump administration has indeed "frozen." Mia provided a thorough examination on Wednesday as to how the funds are hardly worthwhile forms of "humanitarian assistance," especially since funds were going to terrorists in some cases.
Just as CNN's article did, The Dispatch focused on claims from right-wing social media commentators sharing such information about POLITICO. The rest of the article tries to explain/justify/downplay such payments for subscriptions:
According to USAspending.gov, an official source for U.S. government expenditure data—and the resource used by [Kyle] Becker in his post—Politico received $8.2 million in total payments in the previous 12 months. However, payments from USAID are a small fraction of that total. Of the two payments from the agency, only one was in that timeframe.
In September 2023, a staff assistant for the Center for Environment, Energy, and Infrastructure—part of USAID’s Bureau for Development, Democracy, and Innovation—purchased a subscription to E&E for $20,000. According to E&E, prices for its professional subscription packages typically start in the upper four-figure range and vary based on how many users have access to a subscription. Another subscription to E&E was purchased in September 2024 for $24,000 by the Center for Climate Positive Development—an office within USAID’s Bureau for Resilience and Food Security.
Funds received by Politico LLC from other government agencies also came mostly from subscriptions to E&E, or for the company’s policy intelligence platform, Politico Pro. The largest spenders have been the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Department of the Interior (DOI), and Department of Energy (DOE).
When it comes to outlets trying to downplay the cost and use of the money for subscriptions, Tony Kinnett, during Wednesday's episode of "The Tony Kinnett Cast," broke down the magnitude of these funds going toward subscriptions and how the USAID money is going to POLITICO, Reuters, the AP, NPR, and others already taking government money.
The $8 million in 2024 that POLITICO received came "from various government agencies, including USAID," Kinnett explained, as well as $30 million from all U.S. agencies over several years.
Citing Forbes, Kinnett referenced how there are about 10,000 employees within USAID, further pointing out how the $8 million figure doesn't match up with the number of subscriptions, rather that would be more fitting with 40,000 subscriptions. "So unless every single person at USAID is rocking four separate POLITICO subscriptions, there's a significant issue there," Kinnett pointed out.
Speaking about the other publications receiving funds as well, Kinnett stressed that "this is a very, very serious issue here in the United States, that we have taxpayer dollars, which are going to openly political publications that obscure right-wing political points, and independent political points, to dishonestly push left-wing narratives, like when POLITICO ordered staff not to cover the Hunter Biden [laptop] story. Or when POLITICO, and Reuters, and NPR, and CNN, and all of the various outlets out there, claimed on their moral high ground that Joe Biden was fine, and actually his aides say he's doing totally good, and so after all, we're just going to trust everything the president's aides say and call it a day!"
We've saved the most noteworthy for last, though. Perhaps the most shameless defense comes from The New York Times in a Thursday morning piece:
President Trump amplified unfounded claims on Thursday that the government had been paying news media outlets to generate positive coverage of Democrats.
The conspiracy theories appear to have been generated by records showing payments for something much more innocuous: subscriptions.
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The White House also addressed the conspiracy theory on Wednesday, with its press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, saying that the DOGE team was “working on canceling those payments now.
“We are going line by line when it comes to the federal government’s books,” she said.
Regarding the claim about media outlets "generat[ing] positive coverage of Democrats," keep in mind that, as Kinnett mentioned in the episode above, POLITICO was among those outlets told not to report on the laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, who would win the 2020 election a few weeks after the story was squashed by those mainstream media outlets and censored on social media. In fact, on October 19, 2020, just days before the 2020 debate between Trump and Biden, POLITICO put out a piece titled, "Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say." Trump, in his second term, has since revoked the security clearances of those officials.
Further, the use of USAID for subscriptions is hardly considered "innocuous" to many American taxpayers, the people who finally have a voice thanks to this administration, as Leavitt stressed during Wednesday's briefing.
The piece was referring to a Truth Social post that the president made that morning.
LOOKS LIKE BILLIONS OF DOLLARS HAVE BEEN STOLLEN AT USAID, AND OTHER AGENCIES, MUCH OF IT GOING TO THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA AS A “PAYOFF” FOR CREATING GOOD STORIES ABOUT THE DEMOCRATS. THE LEFT WING “RAG,” KNOWN AS “POLITICO,” SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000. Did the New York Times…
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) February 6, 2025
