When legacy mainstream media heard White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt mention yesterday that the U.S. Government was spending $8 MILLION on Politico subscriptions, they immediately went into “right-wing conspiracy theory” name-calling mode, claiming that wasn’t correct because what they heard in their head was “USAID was paying $8M on Politico subscriptions.”
Here’s the full clip:
In the CNN version of the story, they stated that “All federal agencies combined spent $8.2 million last year on Politico Pro, according to USASpending.gov.”
So, as they say, we decided to follow the money to see what the numbers were. Assuming the data pull is correct, CNN was under by around $400,000 for 2024.
A quick search of USAspending.gov shows that since 2015 the U.S. Government has sent $34,260,546 to POLITICO, LLC (Recipient ID: T8JGE1LE8933).
The breakdown is as follows:
- 2015: $13,690.00
- 2016: $475,715.28
- 2017: $1,063,373.00
- 2018: $1,378,867.66
- 2019: $1,491,747.87
- 2020: $2,773,972.82
- 2021: $4,402,032.65
- 2022: $5,892,578.39
- 2023: $7,831,862.48
- 2024: $8,622,084.51
- 2025 (YTD): $314,621.00
Twelve awarding agencies topped the one million dollar mark (2015-YTD):
- Department of Health and Human Services (HHS): $6,969,671
- Department of Energy (DOE): $4,210,124
- Department of the Interior (DOI): $3,519,177
- Department of Agriculture (USDA): $2,535,631
- Executive Office of the President (EOP): $2,206,269
- Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): $2,009,039
- Department of Transportation (DOT): $1,845,420
- Department of the Treasury (TREAS): $1,437,703
- Department of Commerce (DOC): $1,336,685
- Department of Homeland Security (DHS): $1,251,016
- Government Accountability Office (GAO): $1,059,221
- Department of State (DOS): $1,016,845
Rounding out the top fifteen agencies are the Department of Defense (DOD) at $863,719, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at $473,500, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) at $460,921.
As a business, sure, subscriptions are an expense that you can take out, but we’re talking about the government AND taxpayer dollars here. And what’s reportedly a $12,000 – $15,000 base subscription cost for Politico Pro doesn’t even compare to the cost of a newspaper or magazine.
Our take at the moment is that this data seems cut and dry, and this is a strange hill for legacy media as a whole to die on. Unless, of course, this goes far beyond the budget of Politico, which may very well be the case. It would seem that we have more digging to do.
SOURCE: USAspending.gov
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