USAID Funded Politico?

Please, someone tell me this is a joke

Feb 05, 2025

This has gotta be a giant joke. The idea that our government funded Politico — and Politico said nothing about it — is hard to believe.

Here’s what’s going on.

President Donald Trump gave Elon Musk authority to examine federal expenditures for appropriateness and efficiency.

Musk and his DOGE team zeroed in on the United States Agency for International Development. Wikipedia says USAID is “an independent agency primarily responsible for administering civilian foreign aid and development assistance. With a budget of over $50 billion,USAID is one of the largest official aid agencies in the world and accounts for more than half of all U.S. foreign assistance – the highest in the world in absolute dollar terms. USAID has missions in over 100 countries, primarily in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe.”

Stay with me here, because this is important.

DOGE then shut down USAID payments on the grounds is was doing suspicious work and more review is needed. Here are three things USAID funded:

A $1.5 million program slated to "advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia's workplaces and business communities."
Funded a "transgender comic book" in Peru.
A $70,000 program for a "DEI musical" in Ireland.

All red-flag worthy expenditures, I think anyone with half a brain can agree.

But this morning at the daily White House briefing Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that many media outlets including Politico also received funds from USAID. She said:

"I was made aware that USAID has funded media outlets like Politico who I know has a seat in this room. I can confirm that more than $8M taxpayers' dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions on the American taxpayers' dime will no longer be happening. The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now.

This followed by reports on X that no employee at Politico got paid yesterday. Politico management blamed it on a “glitch.”

Podcaster Benny Johnson said what really happened was this:

“This is the biggest scandal in news media history: No employee at Politico got paid yesterday. First time ever the company missed a pay period. This is a crisis. Now we learn Politico — a “news company” — which spent the last 10 years trying to destroy the MAGA Movement was being massively funded by USAID. Trump & Elon deleted their funding. Now Politico will go out of business. The corruption is endless. Good riddance.”

Utah Sen. Mike Lee, upon reading the developing stories had the same reaction I did: “Please tell me this is a joke. Please. Someone?”

I’ve been watching for more information to come out on this. So far, nothing from the legacy news sources. Politico has nothing.

The news outlet Dispatch said the Johnson information and take on it all is “false.”

“The only payments received by Politico LLC from USAID were for two subscriptions to E&E—an energy and environment publication it produces—totaling $44,000 over two years.”

Stay tuned, brothers and sisters. Something’s happening here.

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