One of the most troubling revelations that came out of the USAID’s taxpayer-funded foreign interference saga is that the Democrat-run federal government was bankrolling not only woke NGOs to spread their progressive agendas around the world but also some of the biggest media platforms throughout the West. These include Politico, the favorite outlet of both Washington and Brussels’ liberal elite.
Suspicions about Politico being connected to USAID first arose when the company failed to pay its employees on time right after the Trump administration shut down the organization for wasting taxpayer money on noble causes such as diversity training in Sri Lanka or LGBT activism in Guatemala.
Then, on Wednesday, February 5th, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that the previous Biden administration paid “more than $8 million” to the company through premium subscriptions, “essentially subsidizing subscriptions to Politico on the American taxpayers’ dime.”
Indeed, looking at the publicly available records of U.S. government spending, Washington awarded $8.2 million to Politico through various government agencies last year alone. Counting every fiscal year since 2015, the figure grows to $34.3 million (€33 million) in over 1,300 separate transactions.
The records also show that Politico first received government funds in late 2015 with a sudden increase in the number of contracts registered the next year, during the 2016 presidential election campaign. The funding then nearly doubled during the 2020 election cycle and then began to grow rapidly during the years of the Biden administration, before reaching its all-time high in 2024. Just in the first few weeks of 2025, Politico received another $1.5 million from the outgoing administration.
The biggest ‘subscriber’ was the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) with close to $7 million awarded in total. Two of the HHS’s subsidiaries, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are also among the top five most-paying sub-agencies. Moreover, $2.2 million was paid directly from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) alone.
“No wonder the propaganda from Politico was in perfect alignment with the swamp on stories of critical national significance,” American journalist Liz Wheeler said on X. “Politico propagated lies that Hunter Biden’s laptop wasn’t real but was Russian disinfo. A vicious lie that changed the outcome of the 2020 [presidential] election.”
Now, it’s hard to tell how much of these funds, if any, were received by Politico.eu, the company’s European branch operating from Brussels and underpinning the power of the EU’s liberal elite much in the same way. Or whether it received individual funding from USAID or other U.S. government sources, or even direct EU sources. Europeanconservative.com reached out to Politico for clarification, but no reply was given at the time of writing.
Nonetheless, there is a sense of vindication among conservative politicians both in Brussels and the member states, many of whom have been constant subjects of smear campaigns run by Politico on behalf of the left-leaning EU Commission.
Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán also took a jab at Politico for calling him earlier the “disruptor of the year” while being financed by an organization whose actions are the epitome of foreign interference.
Orbán added that the same goes for much of the Hungarian left-wing media, which received millions of dollars from organizations like USAID and Action for Democracy. The latter even illegally funded the political campaign of the main opposition candidate during the 2022 general elections, which prompted the government to pass the Defense of Sovereignty Law against similar future interference attempts—and is now being sued by the EU Commission for it.
