In another blow to the liberal media’s corrupt spigot of lucrative government subscriptions paid for with your tax dollars, President Trump’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) — led by newly confirmed Secretary Doug Collins — said Monday it cancelled $178,000 in Swampy subscriptions for Politico Pro that can now be used to help the VA fulfill its mission of caring for servicemen and women.
Collins said in a statement to NewsBusters that this marked “a new day at VA” in which “[w]e’re putting Veterans at the center of everything the department does, focusing relentlessly on customer service and convenience.”
“We’re working every day to find new and better ways of helping VA beneficiaries. That means cutting wasteful spending and redirecting resources toward programs that benefit Veterans, families, survivors and caregivers,” he added.
The VA, along with its extensive medical care for the mental, physical, and spiritual needs of those who’ve served the red, white, and blue, also provides services for homeless veterans through its Grant and Per Diem (GPD) Program.
With the maximum per diem per veteran coming in at $71.53 a day, one could use the Politico Pro subscriptions to support one homeless veteran for over six years, which sounds like a far better use of tax dollars to us!
This marks the newest entry into perhaps the most stunning find in the early days of the second Trump term about the rot inside government agencies using tax dollars on subscriptions to liberal news outlets such as Politico Pro, a lucrative, paywalled version of Politico diving into the inner workings of government policymaking.
Most infamously, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — which is on life support — was one such sliver of the bureaucracy shelling out money to read about itself.
The VA cutting ties with Politico put them on par with the Department of Agriculture, which The New York Times divulged on Thursday and fulfills what Axios reported that same day was a White House demand for agencies to ax “every single media contract.”
Politico Pro has this on its website under the heading “What is Politico Pro”:
POLITICO Pro is an all-inclusive platform that empowers public policy professionals with the tools, news, analysis, and other resources needed to succeed in an increasingly complex political world.
Our features include exclusive and unbiased policy news coverage in real-time, in-depth policy analysis and a suite of tracking tools to help you keep tabs on policy developments as they happen. In addition, the fully-integrated stakeholder management solution and government directories enable you to engage with your network effortlessly.
Whether you’re a consultant, analyst, lobbyist or anything else in between, POLITICO Pro has the tools and resources you need to stay ahead of the policy curve.
Better yet, and even before Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) can set up shop at the VA, it had said back on January 27 that they “placed nearly 60 employees who had been solely focused on diversity, equity and inclusion activities on paid administrative leave” with salaries “total[ing] more than $8 million, an average of more than $136,000/year per employee.”
“Additionally, VA has identified several contracts for DEI-related trainings, materials and other consulting services, which the department is currently working to cancel. The combined value of these contracts totals more than $6.1 million,” it added.
