President Trump amplified unfounded claims on Thursday that the government had been paying news media outlets to generate positive coverage of Democrats.
The conspiracy theories appear to have been generated by records showing payments for something much more innocuous: subscriptions.
Mr. Trump said on his Truth Social site that “billions of dollars” from U.S.A.I.D. and other agencies had improperly gone to the “fake news media.” He spread a claim that Politico, a “left wing rag,” had received $8 million, and questioned if The New York Times and other outlets had also received payments.
Users on X this week tried to make a connection between a payroll issue reported at Politico and the administration’s dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., the foreign aid agency. Some users began sharing screenshots that appeared to show federal payments to Politico.
Records on USAspending.gov, a federal site that tracks government payments, show that federal agencies have paid Politico for subscriptions, including to its Politico Pro service. The money allocated to Politico across all agencies was more than $8 million in the 2024 fiscal year, records show. Politico Pro offers policy-related resources and tracks news and legislation, and has more than 30,000 subscribers, according to a Politico overview.
U.S.A.I.D. paid $44,000 to Politico during the 2023 and 2024 fiscal years, according to the spending records, which described the two contracts as for “E&E news subscriptions.” E&E News covers energy and environmental issues.
John Harris, Politico’s editor in chief, and Goli Sheikholeslami, its chief executive, said in a memo to employees on Wednesday that the news organization “has never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies — not one cent, ever, in 18 years.” The public discussion, the memo said, had “left some people with false understandings.”
“As a practical matter, the overwhelming majority of our professional subscriptions under Politico Pro are in the private sector,” the memo said.
Politico said it had no further comment beyond the memo.
Agencies under the Trump administration have also paid for subscriptions, according to the records. In 2017, for example, the Executive Office of the President set aside $97,720 for a payment to Politico.
Charlie Stadtlander, a spokesman for The Times, said in a statement that the only federal funds the company receives were for subscriptions, which have been bought by both Democratic and Republican administrations, including during President Trump’s first term. The amount of revenue from federal subscriptions is less than 1/1000th of The Times’s annual revenue, he said.
Still, the payments to news organizations stoked conspiracy theories that reached Trump officials and other conservative voices. Elon Musk, the head of a team seeking to cut government spending, said on Wednesday that the payments were “not an efficient use of taxpayer funds.”
Mr. Musk was responding to a user who noted a $517,855 payment in 2020 from the Food and Drug Administration for Politico Pro subscriptions. “This wasteful expenditure will be deleted,” he added.
The White House also addressed the conspiracy theory on Wednesday, with its press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, saying that the DOGE team was “working on canceling those payments now.
“We are going line by line when it comes to the federal government’s books,” she said.
Politico’s leaders said in their memo that it was not uncommon for subscribers to discuss contracts when they were up for renewal. “We are happy to have such conversations with our federal government subscribers and are confident that most will see the continued value,” the memo said.
In his all-caps post on Thursday, Mr. Trump wrote: “This could be the biggest scandal of them all, perhaps the biggest in history!”
Benjamin Mullin contributed reporting.
