The General Services Administration (GSA), responsible for the US government’s procurement process, has been instructed to cancel all contracts with media companies. According to a memo from a GSA employee, cited by Axios, the instruction read: “GSA Team, please do two things: pull all contracts with Politico, BBC, E&E (Politico) and Bloomberg. Pull all media contracts back that only affect the GSA today.”
Axios reported that this decision was made in the White House after Elon Musk, head of the Office of Government Efficiency (OGP) and his team discovered that government agencies were spending millions of US dollars on Politico Pro subscriptions.
On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the government had spent a total of eight million US dollars on Politico subscriptions. She added that Musk’s team was working on “suspending these payments.”
On February 6, Donald Trump commented on the media subscriptions on Truth Social, saying: “Politico, the left-wing paper, apparently got eight million dollars. Did The New York Times get money too? Who else? This could be the biggest scandal of all, maybe even the biggest in history!”
Meanwhile, social media reports circulated, suggesting that Politico had received state funds for favorable reporting on Democrats. On Thursday, Politico’s CEO Goli Sheikholeslami and Editor-in-Chief John Harris released a joint statement, denying the allegations: “We have never received a single cent of state funding – no subsidies, no grants, no payments. Not a single cent in 18 years.”
Earlier, Musk had stated that government spending on media, particularly on Associated Press subscriptions, was a waste of taxpayer money and should also be cut. On X, the billionaire wrote that many media outlets would soon face a “mysterious decline in revenue.”
Since Trump’s return to the White House, the US government has increasingly focused on a policy of budget cuts. According to The Washington Post, the OGP, led by Elon Musk, is driving the bureaucratic streamlining process.