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View Full Version : Fact Check: USAID Did NOT Spend Over $8 Million On Politico, LLC


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02-06-2025, 01:21
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Did USAID spend over $8 million on Politico, LLC, as social media posts imply? No, that's not true: The government spending database only shows $44,000 in two transactions. Both were subscriptions, not grants.

by: Uliana Malashenko

The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X where it was published on February 5, 2025. It opened:

So let me get this straight...

USAID has been spending millions of taxpayer dollars every year funding not only the BBC, but also Politico?

https://www.vietbf.com/forum/attachment.php?attac hmentid=2486602&stc=1&d=1738804241

However, the screenshots in the post displaying the figure of over $ 8.1 million among other things did not represent searches per agency.

Politico, LLC is a journalistic organization predominantly covering politics.

Lead Stories searched the database applying two filters, a recipient's name and an awarding/funding agency. The results below show that the total amount spent by the USAID (the U.S. Agency for International Development) on Politico, LLC, is below $50,000. The database only shows two transactions, and both were not grants but subscriptions, as seen here and here.

https://www.vietbf.com/forum/attachment.php?attac hmentid=2486607&stc=1&d=1738804827

A breakdown of the overall $8 million figure from the post on X summarizes what all government agencies spent on Politico, and most of the transactions manually reviewed by Lead Stories were subscriptions.

USAID wasn't even Politico's top paid subscriber among government agencies

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