[aeternum]

What do you think about the legality of each federal department having millions in kickbacks to Politico in the form of hidden premium subscriptions?

What about USAID being used to pay celebrities but only those that support one of the political parties?

[floatrock]

Are we complaining about the millions the feds pay SpaceX for their starlink terminals? Are we concerned about the government subscriptions to Bloomberg feeds?

I'll get rage-y about this one when someone explains what a Politico premium subscription provides and why it was a corrupt purchase. Maybe it's a valid information data service that provides key information to whatever agency purchased it, purchased using an appropriate bidding contract. Or maybe it wasn't.

But the point is show me why that was an inappropriate purchase while Starlink and Bloomberg feeds aren't.

Unfortunately doing that takes investigation and due-process, and it doesn't score the same propaganda points as just yelling "See?! My political opponent had the government as a customer!!"

[remarkEon]

You see the difference between a Starlink and Bloomberg terminal, and a "Pro" subscription to Politico, right?

[floatrock]

I assume you're insinuating a politico pro subscription just lets you read clickbait articles without a paywall, and that's unreasonable?

Is that what a pro subscription is? Or does it provide useful data to a government agency that works on the ground in many different countries?

How about show me the government contract for the purchase that outlines what information they're purchasing? Who else bid on it, and why did Politico win? If they don't provide anything beyond clickbait articles, it should be pretty obvious that they were arbitrary chosen over whatever right-leaning competitor also bid on that sweet sweet government bucks. Every government purchase has mounds of paperwork, lets look into what the contract purchaser was actually trying to get from it before deciding this is a partisan bribe. Or does that take too much work and due-process, and we're just trying to score some quick smear-the-opposition rage points?

I'm all against government corruption, but show me this is corruption rather than a reasonable data purchase.

[remarkEon]

No I'm insinuating that Starlink and Bloomberg are infrastructure, with clear use cases for DoD, the IC, and many many others. No one had really head of Politico Pro until DOGE cut off the subscriptions, and now suddenly it's some critical thing that this government "agency" can't live without when they "work" on the ground in many different countries, like you're claiming. This is despite the fact that we have, ya know, multiple intelligence agencies whose job it is to tell us interesting and useful things about those countries. I don't even know if Politico Pro does that kind of reporting, foreign intelligence. But it doesn't matter, and it doesn't matter if this is corruption either.

[floatrock]

> I don't even know if Politico Pro does that kind of reporting

lol, so you don't know what Politico Pro does, but you know it was worthless, and it doesn't matter because the propaganda points have already been scored and the news cycle has turned over.

This is the world you want to be cheerleading for? Really?

[aeternum]

You can easily look up examples of Politico Pro online and even try a free trial.

And yes it does look worthless. It provides things like a policy template and other boilerplate which an LLM model can now come up.

Pro also offers many articles from their "experts" that happen to be fresh out of college with liberal arts degrees. Quite the irony when the Politico proponents are up in arms about the age of the DOGE members.

[remarkEon]

Not sure how much more clear I can be, you appear to be arguing with a strawman. I think if Politico Pro was some sort of critical infrastructure that the United States Government needed to operate we would've all heard of it before this. Politico would've advertised it as such.

[Volundr]

Starlink yes, Bloomberg no. Can you explain it to me?

[zzzeek]

have them audited by the Office of the Inspector General.

Which is not very easy right now as Trump illegally fired many of them across 17 different offices.

The illegality and unconsitutionalism of the actions being taken to dismantle agencies and placement private citizens without background checks or proper auditing / security procedures inside of highly critical and often classified systems are the issue, not whether or not USAID should be audited or abolished. There are proper channels for that. they are being bypassed (even though fully available to the President with all three branches of government in Republican control).

[jondwillis]

Since we are doing whataboutism, let's also bring up the ~$1 trillion PPP program, ripe with fraud, enabled and designed by Donald Trump, which helped kick off the current wave of inflation.

>The cost per job saved for one year was $169,000 to $258,000, which was much higher than the average amount—$58,200—paid in wages and benefits to small-business employees in 2020. [1]

[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/regional-economist/2...

[aeternum]

Agreed, ripe with fraud and overall an unfair use of taxpayer money. Poorly thought out even for an emergency measure and we should not do it again.