Did DOGE halt a $2.6 million annual payment to former President Obama for "Obamacare" royalties? No, that's not true: The story originated in a meme from a satirical Facebook page. The owner of the page is known for tricking conservatives into liking and sharing made-up content.
The meme appeared in a Facebook post (archived here) published on February 25, 2025. The text accompanying the meme read:
He's been charging the taxpayer for using his name, even though the actual name of Obamacare is "The Affordable Care Act."
The text in the meme itself read:
DOGE stopped an annual payment to Barack Obama for $2.6 million for "royalties associated with Obamacare".
He's been collecting it since 2010, for a total of $39 million taxpayer dollars.
This is what the post looked like on Facebook at the time of writing:
(Source: Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Feb 27 07:35:28 2025 UTC)
The image even included a satire disclaimer that said, "Nothing on the page is real":
(Source: detail from a Facebook screenshot taken on Thu Feb 27 07:37:28 2025 UTC)
The first comment below the Facebook post linked to an article on "The Dunning-Kruger Times" (archived here) titled "DOGE Halts $2.6 Million Annual Payment to Obama for "Obamacare" Royalties", which opened:
Washington, D.C. - In a shocking display of fiscal responsibility, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has uncovered and stopped a $2.6 million annual payment to former President Barack Obama--a fee he was allegedly receiving as royalties for the government using his name in "Obamacare."
According to investigators, a little-known clause buried deep in the Affordable Care Act's legal fine print entitled Obama to a small percentage of every time someone referred to the program by its popular nickname.
The Dunning-Kruger Times website features an "About Us" page (archived here) page that has the following disclaimer:
About Us
Dunning-Kruger-Times.com is a subsidiary of the 'America's Last Line of Defense' network of parody, satire, and tomfoolery, or as Snopes called it before they lost their war on satire: Junk News
The Facebook page (archived here) where the claim originated had a description that read:
According to the page transparency tab of the page, it was run by "Busta Troll," which is the nickname of Christopher Blair.
Christopher Blair is a self-professed liberal from Maine who, for years, has run networks of websites set up to troll conservatives with made-up news items in order to get them to share his posts. A 2018 BBC profile called Blair "the Godfather of fake news," describing him as "one of the world's most prolific writers of disinformation."
His websites usually have multiple satire disclaimers, and the stories very often contain obvious hints they are not real, like category names indicating they are fiction, links to "sources" that instead go to funny or offensive images or an "S for Satire" logo added to the images used as illustration. Another telltale sign is the name "Art Tubolls" (anagram for "Busta Troll") for characters in the stories. Blair also frequently pays homage to two of his friends who passed away by using their names ("Joe Barron" and "Sandy Batt") in stories.
Blair's stories have been widely copied by spammy, foreign website networks trying to make a buck by spamming American conservatives with clickbait headlines.
Here you can find some of the many, many stories from Blair's websites Lead Stories debunked over the years, including one from 2017 that also mentions "Obamacare royalties."
