Agencies ending media contracts after Musk exposes them as ‘wasteful’

Elon Musk has created yet another wave of panic and a slew of conspiracy theories by revealing massive government contracts with media outlets.

Musk revealed that Politico has been receiving more than $8 million a year in ads and subscriptions, which just about set the internet on fire.

The Reveal

Through the end of the 2024 Fiscal year, USASpending.Gov shows that Politico received $8.4 million in taxpayer funds.

Musk stated, “Not an efficient use of taxpayer funds. This wasteful expenditure will be deleted.”

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the report, stating, “I can confirm that the more than eight million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayer’s dime will no longer be happening.

“The DOGE team is working on canceling those payments now. Again, this is a whole-of-government effort to ensure that we are going line by line when it comes to the federal government’s books, and this president and his team are making decisions across the board.”

Subscriptions

To be clear, the money being given to Politico was not any form of grant or a giveaway, but it was apparently to pay for subscriptions. For example, USAID, which has been under fire, was paying $44,000 for “E&E news subscriptions,” which would be for energy and environmental issues.

I am trying to figure out how our government needed more than $8 million in subscriptions for a single media outlet.

Keep in mind that there are subscriptions in place for virtually every mainstream media outlet, so we are paying tens of millions of dollars for these subscriptions throughout the government.

Politico is now trying to put the fire out, stating, “We are happy to have such conversations with our federal government subscribers and are confident that most will see the continued value.”

Conspiracy Theories Run Wild

The timing of this report coincided with a report that Politico had a payroll issue, with staffers receiving their money late. Now, I can tell you that when working in the hotel industry, this would happen from time to time when the payroll company had some type of processing issue, which is more than likely what happened here.

However, the internet started to run wild with theories that Trump had already put Politico out of business by cutting these contracts, which is utterly ridiculous. There is no way it would impact the outlet that quickly.

Trump did not help matters by posting, “THE LEFT WING ‘RAG,’ KNOWN AS ‘POLITICO,’ SEEMS TO HAVE RECEIVED $8,000,000. Did the New York Times receive money??? Who else did??? THIS COULD BE THE BIGGEST SCANDAL OF THEM ALL, PERHAPS THE BIGGEST IN HISTORY! THE DEMOCRATS CAN’T HIDE FROM THIS ONE. TOO BIG, TOO DIRTY!”

I will tell you what… I will guarantee that when Trump was in office in 2017-21, all these publications were being paid, but it was never uncovered because nobody was going over the books line by line like Musk is now. This is not the scandal everyone wants it to be, so just take a breath. I am not saying it is not waste, but it is surely not what people are making it out to be as something nefarious.