Federal bureaucrats and supervisors have sent millions of your taxpayer dollars to Politico LLC, the company that publishes Politico, Politico Magazine, and high-priced specialty products such as Politico Pro, which includes tracking tools for legislation and regulation. According to a federal spending database, the total bill was more than $8 million in 2024.
This discovery caused a kerfuffle online last week. Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson declared “the biggest scandal in news media history,” claiming Politico “was being massively funded by USAID.” Johnson provided a screen grab from USAspending.gov showing that Politico LLC received $8.2 million in federal spending.
This wave of social media attention included many erroneous assumptions. Many believed these millions came as federal grants. Others, like Johnson, suggested the money was entirely or largely coming from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Others claimed the spending was secret.
The spending, though, was always public record, available in online databases. Almost none of it (only about $20,000) was coming from USAID. And rather than grants, the spending was in contracts: hundreds of subscriptions to Politico’s premier products, such as Politico Pro and the energy-and-environment-focused E&E News.
You can easily argue that it’s wasteful for taxpayers to spend $8 million on such subscriptions, but on that score, it needs to be noted that the Trump administration spent more than $1 million a year on Politico subscriptions, too.
Behind the misleading social media overreactions and the indignant defenses of this spending is a murkier matter about the swamp economy — the self-reinforcing ecosystem of media, lobbyists, politicians, and bureaucrats, who may seem to be in tension with one another but all work to suck more and more wealth and energy into the swamp.
Subsidy or subscription?
The erroneous impression promulgated on social media was that USAID was propping up Politico in the same way it props up various left-wing media and nonprofit enterprises around the world.
This charge was appealing because, in the first days of February, social media carried tales of the many ideological crusades that USAID and the State Department undertake with tax dollars, including transgender Colombian opera support. The State Department, CIA, USAID, and the U.S. military have long backed cultural and media products they believed served their interests, so maybe the left-leaning Politico was another such op, conservatives believed.
“POLITICO has never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies,” declared Politico honchos Goli Sheikholeslami and John Harris. “Not one cent, ever, in 18 years.”
The cynical right-wing reaction: The subscriptions really are a subsidy.
This accusation implies that the federal officials who bought $8 million in Politico Pro subscriptions didn’t do so because they believed that these subscriptions would help their employees do their jobs better but that they did so to funnel tax dollars into Politico. This was either a quid pro quo, the theory goes — former President Joe Biden buying good coverage — or simply a liberal effort to prop up a liberal entity with tax dollars.
There’s no evidence of this quid pro quo, and this argument is weakened by the $1 million to $1.5 million per year that the Trump administration spent on premium Politico subscriptions.
And under Trump, it wasn’t just the deep state or liberal bureaucrats buying the product. In Trump’s first term, the Executive Office of the President — that is, the White House itself — spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on Politico subscriptions. For instance, in August 2019, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget ordered 45 subscriptions to Politico Pro, costing the taxpayer $67,195.03.
By the logic of right-wing social media, OMB Directors Mick Mulvaney and Russell Vought were subsidizing Politico, just not quite as much as Biden did.
Politico’s defense, meanwhile, is weakened by the partisanship of the publication. Sheikholeslami and Harris denied ever receiving a federal “subsidy,” which is untrue if you use Politico’s own definition of “subsidy.”
The word “subsidy” in its various forms appears 15 times in a Politico news article headlined “Taxpayers fund teaching creationism.”
How do taxpayers subsidize creationism? It turns out they don’t, using any normal understanding of the word “subsidize.”
More than 100 years ago, state governments took up K-12 education as a central state responsibility, alongside building highways and bridges.
Some states, in addition to funding government-run schools directly, also grant school vouchers to parents, allowing them to choose nongovernment schools.
In this hit piece, Politico turned to an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer to explain the problem: “Taxpayer dollars are ending up in the coffers of religious schools, and they use that money to discriminate and indoctrinate.”
It is just as true to say of federal bureaucrats’ subscriptions to left-leaning outlets: “Taxpayer dollars are ending up in the coffers of liberal outlets, and they use that money to discriminate and indoctrinate.”
If taxpayer dollars ending up in religious schools through the choice of parents is a subsidy, then taxpayer dollars ending up at Politico through the choice of bureaucrats is also a subsidy.
This isn’t a good definition of subsidy, but it’s one Politico used because, as a publication, it is disdainful of religious institutions. Politico’s antipathy toward organized religion and ignorance of religious or socially conservative beliefs is long-standing and persistent:
The magazine recently ran an unhinged screed headlined “The Far Right’s Campaign to Explode the Population,” which it illustrated with one picture of a Bible and two different pictures of rosaries. Politico long employed, as a straight news reporter, Heidi Przybyla, who saw herself as a crusader against Christian nationalism, which she famously defined on MSNBC as the belief in God-given rights. The outlet falsely smeared Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, accusing him of making up claims about aborted babies and vaccines. Politico published an error-filled hit piece on Justice Amy Coney Barrett for being Catholic — a hit piece illustrated with a photo of a cross at the end of a rosary.
Given this antipathy, it’s natural for Politico’s editors to be offended when taxpayer dollars eventually end up in the coffers of religious schools. For the same reason, the average conservative or Trump supporter is angry that millions of their dollars are ending up in the coffers of Politico.
Swamp economy
Washington media types and grassroots MAGA types will never agree on this matter because there is a chasm in beliefs and experience.
For the normal American, who probably couldn’t expense a $50-a-year daily newspaper subscription to his employer, multiple $12,000-a-year subscriptions in the same office seem unthinkable. (But then again, Vought, Trump’s OMB director, should explain why his office had dozens of them.)
Also, the normal right-leaning American has developed a bottomless distrust of the ruling class and the legacy media, especially after Politico propped up a conspiracy by intelligence community officials who tried to bury the stories of Hunter Biden’s misdeeds right before the 2020 election by suggesting his laptop was really a plant by Russian disinformation operatives.
After those deceptions and the serial abuse of power by public officials and legacy media during COVID, it’s impossible to convince a lot of people that there is no state-media conspiracy against them.
There’s a subtler dynamic here, though, that is missed both by the DOGE-types trying to cut off federal funds to Politico and by the defenders of the bureaucracy and the media. It involves the ecology and economy of the swamp.
Federal subscribers are less than 10% of Politico’s premier subscribers, data suggest, which means that lots of folks in the private sector are paying $12,000 a year for Politico Pro or E&E News. If you wonder how Politico can charge $1,000 a month for its premier products, it’s because many businesses believe it to be very valuable to know, in detail and very quickly, what is happening with legislation and regulation.
Politico Pro also provides transcripts earlier and agency and committee calendars more thoroughly than any free product does. Of course, Politico Pro also gives its subscribers detailed directories of state, congressional, and executive branch officials.
If you are a lobbyist, this really helps you do your job. If you are a corporate executive, you’re happy to foot the bill for your lobbyist to have these tools because every week, there may be some regulation in which a tiny tweak could make your company many millions of dollars.
So, the more involved the government gets in the profit and loss of business, the more valuable Politico Pro becomes. The more green-energy subsidies, fossil-fuel subsidies, environmental regulations, and ethanol mandates, et cetera that exist, the more valuable Politico’s Energy & Environment is.
And here’s where the real conflict of interest, or alignment of interests, enters. First, Politico, on aggregate, tilts its coverage to push for more regulations, subsidies, and mandates. More deviously, the publication harasses companies that do not spend enough money on lobbying.
Consider Apple during the Obama years. In 2010, Politico wrote a piece attacking Apple for not being D.C.-centric enough. “While Apple’s success has earned rock-star status in Silicon Valley, its low-wattage approach in Washington is becoming more glaring to policymakers. Despite its increasing influence over consumers’ use of technology — most recently with the iPad and iPhone 4 — Apple has kept a particularly low profile inside the Beltway.”
Here’s what they meant:
“It is one of the few major technology companies not to have a political action committee. While CEO Steve Jobs supported the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore, he hasn’t been especially active in political fundraising or races. …
“Compared with other tech giants, Apple’s lobbying expenditures are small. In 2009, Apple spent only $1.5 million to lobby the federal government, less than Amazon, Yahoo, and IBM. In 2009, Google, for example, spent $4 million, Microsoft $7 million, and AT&T $15 million.”
Two years later, Politico revisited the problem of Apple:
“Apple is taking a bruising in Washington, and insiders say there’s a reason: It’s the one place in the world where the company hasn’t built its brand,” Politico explained in a 2012 story. “In the first three months of this year, Google and Microsoft spent a little more than $7 million on lobbying and related federal activities combined. Apple spent $500,000 — even less than it spent the year before.”
“The company’s attitude toward D.C. — described by critics as ‘don’t bother us’ — has left it without many inside-the-Beltway friends.”
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Get the message? You’d better pay attention to Washington — you’d better hire bureaucrats and staffers as lobbyists, and you’d better ramp up your PAC donations, or you can expect abuse from the government and D.C. media.
If the government were the proper size, there wouldn’t be so much demand for a $1,000 premium regulation-tracking database and bureaucrat directory. But the bigger the swamp, the healthier the swamp economy.