Trump to cut off exorbitant payments to Left-wing legacy media

The Trump administration will cut off enormous government payments to Left-wing legacy media outlets made through the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the decision on Wednesday after the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) began combing through the agency’s spending records this week. The Elon Musk-led DOGE is in the process of shutting down USAID, which has been a major source of funding for the Democratic Party and its globalist agenda.

“I was made aware of the funding from USAID to media outlets, including Politico, who I know has a seat in this room,” Leavitt said at a press conference. “I can confirm that the more than $8 million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers’ dime will no longer be happening. The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now.”

According to reports, the federal government has paid Politico $34 million in contracts across several agencies, including a $44,000 payment from USAID. The funding was not given through official government grants but through subscriptions to Politico’s premium service, Politico Pro, at a reported annual cost of $10,000 each. However, figures from USASpending.gov show that the legacy media outlet was paid $8.2 million for 237 subscriptions, which comes out to approximately $35,000 for each sign-up.

The federal government reportedly began to ramp up payments to Politico in 2015, the year Trump launched his presidential campaign. Politico has since become a hardline anti-Trump publication and served as a propaganda tool for the Biden administration. In 2020, for example, the news site falsely told readers that the Hunter Biden laptop story about the Biden family’s corruption was “Russian disinformation.” Politico’s editors refused to run negative news stories about the Bidens, according to whistleblowers. In 2022, it leaked a draft of the US Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson overturning Roe v. Wade, which sparked violent protests and assassination threats against conservative justices. 

Since DOGE shuttered USAID’s office this week and placed most of the agency’s employees on leave, Politico missed payroll for the first time in its history due to a “technical error.” The error has reportedly been resolved, but the “Request for Pricing” button on Politico Pro’s site page is no longer there. The company has not responded to numerous media inquiries or to outrage from the public.

Sam Lyman, who worked for the US Chamber of Commerce and for Senator Orrin Hatch, said he had a subscription but never used it.

“When I worked in the Senate, we all had Politico Pro by default. I never signed up for it. So I can only assume it was a blanket deal Politico had worked out w/the federal gov. I never used it—not even once. Got 0 value out of it. Gobsmacking to hear a subscription = $10k.”

USAID: A CIA propaganda tool

Politico is not the only mainstream media outlet to receive exorbitant payments from the federal government. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), for example, paid The New York Times over $26 million for subscriptions.

But the focus on USAID has vindicated previous remarks by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, about the agency’s role as a propaganda vehicle for the CIA. While the agency claims its $40 billion budget is for humanitarian aid, it has spent decades shaping the global political landscape and spreading Leftist ideologies like transgenderism and DEI around the world.

In an interview with OMG CEO James O’Keefe, Kennedy referred to Operation Mockingbird, a program in which the CIA used news media to spread propaganda to the American people. After the 1975 Church Committee hearings, which investigated abuses by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the CIA agreed to never again use American journalists for propaganda purposes. Instead, the intelligenc agency uses international media operatives.

“The CIA promised that it would no longer compromise American journalists,” Kennedy said. “It continued the program to compromise journalists all over the world, and today the CIA is the biggest funder of journalism in the world. They fund it through USAID.”

Kennedy added that he believes that an Obama executive order re-opened the door for Project Mockingbird to spread propagands directly to the American public, which is evidenced by the deep ties some media operatives have to US intelligence agencies.

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