Another Insane Government Money Laundering Scheme Revealed

As you might have noticed, every so often I give a pitch for our subscription service, DailyWire+. And by “every so often,” I mean three times a day. I explain the reasons why I think it’s a good deal. And then you, as the listener, can decide whether or not you want to subscribe. I don’t force you to pay The Daily Wire any money. I don’t steal anything from you. I just make the pitch, and then the free market takes over from there.

But after reading reports yesterday on some of the government spending that’s being scrutinized by DOGE, it looks like I’ve been going about things all wrong this whole time. As it turns out, there’s no need for media companies to actually convince anyone to buy their products. There’s certainly no need to come up with a competitive price, or anything like that. Instead, all you have to do is make some friends in the government, and they’ll buy millions of dollars’ worth of subscriptions from you. And you can set whatever rate you want for the subscription, too. You can charge tens of thousands of dollars annually, per person, if you want. After all, it’s the federal government. They have limitless resources, courtesy of taxpayers. Who’s going to notice?

This week, as the Trump administration goes line-by-line through the federal budget, people did notice that this was going on. Reporting from Kyle Becker, Liz Wheeler and others has just established that the Left-wing outlet POLITICO, from fiscal year 2016 to 2025, has raked in more than $8 million in total from federal government agencies. Specifically, POLITICO has been selling subscriptions to its so-called “POLITICO Pro” service for $10,000 a pop. NASA spent something like half a million dollars on these subscriptions. So did the Food and Drug Administration. They spent nearly $520,000 for just 37 subscriptions. The State Department spent more than a million dollars. The Defense Department spent more than $850,000. For its part, USAID, the agency that funds secret coups all over the world, spent tens of thousands of dollars on POLITICO Pro.

And it’s not just POLITICO that’s receiving massive amounts of money from the federal government in recent years. The Associated Press has been pulling in several million dollars a year from the government, going back several years. So has the New York Times. In fact, just last August, the New York Times reported that it had received over a million dollars from the federal government. This is big money that, before 2021, the New York Times wasn’t making. But after the Biden administration came into power, the firehouse of federal subscriptions opened up. All of this is documented on official government websites. But until now, it’s gone unreported.

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What this means cannot be overstated. Many countries have state media. It’s a hallmark of authoritarian regimes everywhere. But we have something even more sinister in this country, which is state media that claims to be independent. Say what you will about North Korean state television, but they at least admit that they’re controlled by the government. Left-wing media outlets in this country don’t have the decency to do that. They were happy to continue collecting money from the government — which of course means they’re taking money from you — without disclosing their conflict of interest in any of their reporting. The government also never asked you for permission to buy these subscriptions with your money.

But they won’t be collecting that money anymore. Yesterday the White House press secretary announced that this funding — and in particular the millions of dollars for POLITICO — has already been cut:

.@PressSec: "I can confirm that the more than $8 million taxpayer dollars that have gone to essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers' dime will no longer be happening." pic.twitter.com/9uA1imuKtt

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) February 5, 2025

If you look at the Left-wing response to this situation, they’ll tell you that everything’s being blown out of proportion. CNN for example ran the headline: “White House says it will cancel $8 million in POLITICO subscriptions after a false right-wing conspiracy theory spreads.”

So the fact that POLITICO got $8 million from the federal government is true, but apparently the story is still a “false right-wing conspiracy theory.” And they make that claim because they say some people are reporting that Politico got $8 million in one year, when it was really spread out over several years. That’s supposed to make this all OK. Rather than Politico getting 8 million dollars in one year, it got about one million dollars a year for eight or nine years. Somehow that doesn’t make it sound any better, in my view. If anything, it’s worse.

Meanwhile an Associated Press “investigative reporter” named Byron Tau wrote this: “I looked at these contracts and I have my own fun fact. This is occurring because agencies (not just USAID) are buying subscriptions to Politico’s Pro editorial product, not because Politico is getting grants or other federal funding.” 

Then he adds, “This is true of every media outlet with a subscription model.”

That last line is particularly amusing, because it’s very obviously not true. It’s true for the AP, where Byron Tau works. They’re selling tons of subscriptions to the federal government. But it’s not true for conservative publications like The Daily Wire. As far as I’m aware, we didn’t rake in $8 million from the federal government over the last few years. We raked in nothing. Why might that be?

If you listen to POLITICO, they’ll tell you that their product is superior. They just put out a statement claiming that they offer, “granular, fact-based reporting.” They didn’t cite any specific examples of this excellent reporting, though, which is pretty conspicuous. In fact, no one defending POLITICO on social media was able to point to a single example of “granular, fact-based reporting” from POLITICO. And we all know why that is. POLITICO doesn’t generally offer quality reporting. Unlike The Daily Wire, when they “break news” over at POLITICO, it’s completely fake. It’s a lie that’s intended to benefit the people who are paying their salaries in the federal government.

Maybe the most obvious example of this propaganda came just before the 2020 election, when POLITICO published the blatant falsehood that Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation.” Here’s that headline:

What happened here is that dozens of partisan former intelligence officials got together, and they decided that they needed to give Joe Biden some cover. They needed to hand him a talking point before the debate. And I’m not speculating about that, by the way. The former Acting CIA Director, Mike Morell, literally sent out an email to the former intelligence officials, telling them they needed to provide a “talking point” to the Biden campaign. And then when the debate rolled around, Biden used that talking point, just like they drew it up:

Former Acting CIA Director Mike Morell told ex-intel officials they should sign the Hunter Biden laptop letter so they could give Joe Biden a “talking point” to use in the Oct. 2020 debate vs. Trump— & that’s exactly how Joe Biden used it a few days later.pic.twitter.com/pSLBkW7uHb

— Jerry Dunleavy IV ???????? (@JerryDunleavy) January 19, 2025

Whatever you call this POLITICO story about these intelligence officials — election interference, a fraud on the public, a threat to democracy, whatever — you can’t call it journalism. And you also can’t deny that the bureaucrats who sent millions of dollars to POLITICO, in the end, got their money’s worth. They wanted to keep Trump out of office. And in part because of this stunt, four years ago, it worked.

But that whole episode was nothing out of the ordinary. As anyone who reads POLITICO understands very well, attempting to keep Trump out of the White House is essentially the mission statement over there. Just ahead of the most recent election, for example, POLITICO wrote that Trump was delivering a, “racist, anti-immigrant” message, which was getting “darker.”

This isn’t exactly a unique take on the Left, of course. Pretty much every liberal blog has been saying the same thing for a decade. But POLITICO said that they had “watched 20 Trump rallies,” to really provide a comprehensive analysis of all the racism and anti-immigrant messages. They went the extra mile. That’s why they deserve $8 million from taxpayers.

If you show these headlines to POLITICO’s defenders in the federal government, they’ll tell you that “POLITICO Pro” — which is the product the feds are paying for — is actually different from the free “POLITICO.” They’ll claim that POLITICO Pro offers a higher-end product that’s actually “fact-based” and highly useful to the federal government. But if you go looking at headlines from POLITICO Pro, you’ll quickly realize that’s not true, either. Take this headline for example:

The headline states, “Former Senator James Inhofe, who called climate change a ‘hoax,’ dead at 89.” So they’re reporting on the death of a senator, which isn’t exactly a big, exclusive scoop. Everyone else was reporting on this at the time. But POLITICO Pro’s special “contribution” to the story is to mock James Inhofe, because he didn’t want to dismantle the U.S. economy in order to change global weather patterns. So they throw that little aside into the headline on his obituary. He’s dead, and the most important thing we want you to know about him is that he didn’t believe in our climate narratives. That’s the “keen, fact-based” reporting you can only get at POLITICO Pro. That’s apparently worth $10 thousand a year.

In their defense, in their statement addressing their payments from the federal government, POLITICO goes on to claim that, “POLITICO has never been a beneficiary of government programs or subsidies — not one cent, ever, in 18 years.”

So their defense is to rely on semantics, essentially. They know that subscriptions have such a high price — five figures in most cases — precisely because the government will happily pay it. They know that their coverage has been extremely favorable to permanent Washington. But they think no one will recognize this as a payout or a “subsidy,” because in the line item, it’s a “subscription.”

As egregious as this particular story is, the truth is that this problem is far more endemic than the journalism industry. As Mike Cernovich has pointed out, until this week, basically the whole DC/Northern Virginia economy ran on tax money funneled to NGOs, non profits, and media outlets. The White House announced the other day that we’ve spent $20 million for a Sesame Street show in Iraq, $8 million to teach Sri Lankan journalists how to avoid “binary-gendered language,” $2 million for sex changes in Guatemala, and $2 million to help the BBC “value the diversity of Libyan society.”

As the writer Peachy Keenan pointed out, we also spent $40 million for AIDS drugs for transgender prostitutes in South Africa. Specifically, the money provides “accessible clinical interventions” for sex workers. There’s also $8 million that we spent to study the “effect of flavored cigarettes on bisexuals and lesbians,” as well as roughly $100million to combat HIV in Ukraine. Again, that’s the stated reason for all of these expenditures. Almost certainly, most of this money is simply being stolen.

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This is one of the biggest political scandals in American history, and we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg. And this is only a handful of agencies we’re talking about here. Imagine what Elon could turn up if he audited the IRS, ATF, FBI, and other massive federal agencies. In fact, that appears to be exactly what’s happening. DOGE officials have just been spotted at FBI headquarters, as well as the Department of Education. And last night, the Wall Street Journal reported that DOGE is now looking into Medicare fraud, which is far more pervasive than most people realize. Specifically, DOGE has been granted access to payment and contracting systems at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and they’re already on-site.

If DOGE is successful in just this one area, the savings for taxpayers will be astronomical. As the Journal reports: “Insurers Pocketed $50 Billion From Medicare for Diseases No Doctor Treated.”

Here’s how the Journal explained the problem: “Insurers can add diagnoses to ones that patients’ own doctors submit. Medicare gave insurers that option so they could catch conditions that doctors neglected to record. The Journal’s analysis, however, found many diagnoses were added for which patients received no treatment, or that contradicted their doctors’ views.”

This is the kind of systemic fraud that has defined government spending for generations. There is massive waste, bribery and corruption at every level. Outlets like POLITICO haven’t reported on it, for the simple reason that they benefited from that spending. But it’s coming to an end now. A lot of these corporate outlets are going to have to survive on their own merits, which is to say that they won’t survive at all. They will run out of money very quickly. And the rest of us — people who are tired of reading thinly veiled propaganda from the intelligence agencies, and wasting billions of dollars on various forms of government-sponsored fraud — will get to keep more of our own money.

This is what DOGE promised to do. And right now, based on the panic that’s overtaking Left-wing newsrooms in Washington, they’re succeeding beyond anyone’s wildest imagination.