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.
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?
This is what it looked like at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Wed Feb 5 11:44:44 2025 UTC)
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 (archived here), 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.
(Source: USA Spending screenshot taken on Wed 5 17:19:06 2025 UTC)
(Source: USA Spending screenshot taken on Wed 5 17:18:03 2025 UTC)
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.
(Source: USA Spending screenshot taken on Wed Feb 5 18:07:47 2025 UTC)
USAID wasn't even Politico's top paid subscriber among government agencies, as seen in the chart below:
(Source: USA Spending screenshot taken on Wed Feb 5 18:11:42 2025 UTC)
Lead Stories contacted Politico for additional comments.
Other Lead Stories fact checks of the claims about current events are here.
