Politico Loses Millions in Government Funding. Good.
The federal government is giving money to news media
The U.S. government has paid over $30 million in subscription fees to the news site Politico, an expenditure that the Trump administration just halted.
Trump’s spiteful attack on federal payments to what he considers the “fake news” media, whatever his motives, is a good thing. Politico is a billion dollar private company that, apart from its publicly available reporting, sells the U.S. government’s own data back to it in the form of glossy insider products. That is hardly some kind of public interest journalistic endeavor. So why should ordinary people’s taxes pay for it?
The major media refuses to answer this question and instead has gone to bat for Politico with misleading “fact checks” and compulsive repetitions of the phrase “conspiracy theory.” Here are some examples:
CBS: “Trump makes misleading claims about government payments to Politico. Here’s a fact check,”
New York Times: “Trump Amplifies Conspiracy Theory Over Payments to Politico,”
CNN: “White House says it will cancel $8 million in Politico subscriptions after a false right-wing conspiracy theory spreads,” and
TIME: “Trump and Musk Promote Misleading ‘Scandal’ About Government Funding Media.”
Headlines like these leave the impression that cutting funding to Politico is merely some kind of paranoid fever swamp reserved for Alex Jones types. This week, these and other major media stories disputed Trump’s claim that USAID had paid Politico $8 million, which indeed was fact-challenged. But not entirely off-base.
In fact, Politico did receive $8 million in government payments in fiscal year 2024 alone, per data we pulled together in the chart below. It just (mostly) wasn’t from USAID, though the foreign aid agency did subscribe to Politico’s premium products at the far more modest sum of $44,000. Other government agencies shelled out far more, like the Department of Health and Human Services, which purchased Politico licenses worth more than ten times what USAID spent.
This week, all federal contracts that buy Politico’s premium services were canceled, terminating subscriptions to a half dozen or so different products. It’s hard to figure out exactly how much money Politico has gotten from the federal government, or the value of multi-year contracts that the federal government is on the hook for. Using the Federal Procurement Data System (FPDS) and USA Spending databases, which are incomplete, the U.S. government has paid Politico more than $30 million over a decade and a half.
Government contracts purchase Politico premium products, including:
Politico Pro Plus
Politico Pro Premium
Politico Pro EU
Energy Wire
Climatewire
E&E Daily
Greenwire
E&E News
According to these same data, the federal government has been spending between $6-8 million a year over the past three years for Politico services. Politico Pro, the company says, offers “tools and intelligence to influence government priorities” with slick, user-friendly features like legislation trackers, bill summaries and policymaker directories. In other words, the federal government shells out millions to learn about its own goings-on from reports based on the government’s own data. Taxes pay for government to produce the data and for Politico to process the data into proprietary formats the public never gets to access.
If the government thinks its own data is too unruly to navigate (which it is) or Congress is not giving the public all it needs to track legislative processes, maybe they could actually fix these problems. Politico is far from the only company that takes insider government data not readily available to the public and then sells it back to the federal government.
Because Politico has a public side, producing journalism about Washington goings on (and generally critical of Trump), it is one of the president’s first targets. “President Trump ordered the termination of all federal media contracts, so taxpayers aren't on the hook for subsidizing Fake News publications,” the White House said in a statement yesterday, referring to its cancellation of the Politico subscriptions.
God only knows how many other media subscriptions the government pays for, but it looks like the Trump administration is going to try and find out. Whatever his reasons, I don’t see what’s wrong with that.
The move has been cast as an assault on the free press, but Politico is more than just a news website. If the company wants to pursue a business model of selling insider information and government data to private companies, lobbying and law firms, and other institutions, so be it. But when you aren’t writing for the benefit of the general public, don’t expect them to rush to your defense when your cash cow gets slaughtered.
This isn’t the last battle that will be fought over government funding of journalism, with outlets like NPR and PBS on Trump’s chopping block. Unlike Politico, those cases raise a more interesting question: should the government have a role in free expression?
— Edited by William M. Arkin
The question that comes to mind is: can the government reproduce the function that Politico (and other outlets) served in a more cost effective way without losing the value of the product? If it aids government functioning, I don’t mind my tax money going to make things work better. If it’s cost effective to buy these reports from third parties instead of hiring people to produce them, what’s the problem? I haven’t seen anyone talking about that perspective before deciding it’s a “bad” thing.
In how many ways does private enterprise feed off of government funds? It is hard to imagine that Congress passed any legislation that specifically names Politico to be a beneficiary, so that means that some decision maker somewhere made the call.
The "Medicare Advantage" program is a gift to private insurance companies. The elephant in the room is the "defense" industry that gains directly from the nearly $1 trillion "defense" budget. I heard that Musk is going to the Pentagon. Praise be!
Today it was news that NOAA is being invaded by DOGE. Privatize NOAA, so that all of the weather information freely available to the public becomes subject to fees that must be paid to get a forecast or to view a satpic from a satellite that we have paid for? I am worried that Musk is on a mission to blow everything up so that private enterprise can selectively pick up this or that piece and profit from it.