Republicans Still Have Media Subscriptions MAGA Claimed Were Payoffs
Plus: A government shutdown is all but assured
All the news that’s fit to subsidize
Months after conservatives reacted with rage to revelations from Elon Musk’s DOGE that government agencies were paying for subscriptions to premium news and information services like Politico Pro and Bloomberg LP, many federal employees continue to subscribe to the publications using taxpayer funds.
Not everyone has continued to shell out thousands of dollars for access to those publications. Indeed, the number of House Republicans who began new Politico Pro subscriptions in 2025 is notably less than those who began new subscriptions in 2024. But among those who continue to subscribe are some of the same conservative members of Congress who were vocal champions of DOGE’s cost-cutting mission.
That they would continue to do so makes sense. Services like Politico Pro are essential for policymakers, lobbyists, and the employees of government agencies. Without access, they would be left in the dark on an untold number of news- and industry-related developments that are directly relevant to their work. The systems made available through these subscriptions are similar to the Bloomberg Terminal, a workstation that grants access to a massive amount of compressed financial information in real time. The terminal is a crucial tool for anyone who works in high finance, and it’s also a highly specialized piece of equipment, which is why a subscription to cover one terminal costs tens of thousands of dollars per user per year.
But these are subtleties, and if there’s one thing DOGE never allowed to affect its decisions one way or the other, it’s subtlety. When Elon Musk’s teams of aggrieved adolescent nerds began heedlessly ripping apart various federal agencies, offering up contextless budgetary line items like the Politico Pro subscriptions to provide justification for the hacking and slashing, right-wing content creators and elected officials responded gleefully. The subscriptions, they insisted, were part of some kind of massive payoff scheme to the Mainstream Media™, which in exchange gave the Deep State the coverage they coveted .
This narrative exploded on social media in early February. High-profile right-wing influencers like Dana Loesch (“every news agency should be investigated”), Benny Johnson (“the biggest scandal in news media history”), and Kyle Becker (“raking in millions of dollars in government money for years”) picked it up. Naturally, Elon Musk also chimed in to elevate the dishonest claims: “This is obviously a huge waste of taxpayer money!”