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

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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?



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.



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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