Did the New York Post report that USAID paid TIME Magazine $4 million to make Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy the 2022 Person of the Year, as a post and video on X.com claimed? No, that's not true: As of this writing, the newspaper's website did not show such a story. A search across a government spending database did not produce any matching results supporting the claim.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X on February 26, 2025. It opened:
USAID paid Time magazine 4 million dollars to name Zelensky 'Person of the Year.' Is there any media that wasn't on USAID payroll? It's not just dollars, it's US taxpayers' dollars. If it weren't for Trump and DOGE, most people would still have no idea how much money the government wastes. Politico, CBS, TIME, BBC. They all got paid for pushing the narrative down our throats.
The post included a video with the New York Post logo on it.
This is what it looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Fri Feb 28 15:01:52 2025 UTC)
The one-minute video narrated by a male voice began:
Since Trump Administration started its work, DOGE has discovered huge amounts of money wasted by the government.
In 2022, USAID paid Time Magazine 4 million dollars for them to award Ukrainian President Zelensky the title of the Person of the Year.
However, neither an internal search on the New York Post website nor a Google search for the keywords seen here across it produced any matches:
(Source: New York Post screenshot taken on Fri Feb 28 16:46:53 2025 UTC)
(Source: Google screenshot taken on Fri Feb 28 14:09:36 2025 UTC)
An audio verification tool available via the InVid plugin (archived here) showed that the sound in the video from social media was likely AI generated voice cloning:
(Source: InVid screenshot taken on Fri Feb 28 16:26:46 2025 UTC)
A search for the keywords seen here across a federal spending database did not show transactions corroborating that TIME ever received $4 million from USAID:
(Source: USAspending.gov screenshot taken in Fri Feb 28 10:34:50 2025 UTC)
Zelenskyy became the TIME 2022 Person of the Year (archived here), following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
On February 27, 2025, the Ukrainian government Center for Countering Disinformation wrote on Telegram (archived here) about the claim reviewed in this fact check, as translated by DeepL:
This information is untrue.
Lead Stories contacted the New York Post and TIME for additional comments.
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Lead Stories previously wrote that USAID did not spend over $8 million on Politico.
Other Lead Stories fact checks mentioning USAID can be found here. Stories concerning Volodymyr Zelenskyy are here.
