[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.

[floatrock]

I don't think you understand how much contracting and paperwork goes into any kind of government purchase.

I've flirted with government contracts before, and I've worked with large information-as-a-service providers before. So I understand the value of niche information providers. I'm not a policy guy, so I don't know what kind of information a policy-heavy government group needs, but it sounds like a completely plausible service to me.

Given the Occam's Razor between "government bureaucracy-levels of contracting and oversight required to do any purchase still resulted in a corrupt money-handoff" and "Elon's got a tendancy towards theatrics and smearing the political opposition, so he's using this to tickle people's amygdala and move on before people look too closely at it", I'm going with the latter.

Prove to me that the niche job functions of the people who purchased this didn't actually require any of this information using the mounds of contracting paperwork that surely exist, or just admit that proving it was never the point and it was all about outrage theatrics before people bothered to do the actual work of looking into this.

[remarkEon]

I've managed Gov contracts before, but I've never used services like this, so fair enough I'm not an "expert" in what exactly it is they provide, if that's what you're asking. But I certainly know what the bureaucratic side of things looks like. For your razor, what makes you think both things are not true? Usually when I construct a razor the two options are, at least partially, mutually exclusive. In yours it's certainly plausible that there was some back-scratching going on, and that Elon is using this opportunity to grind his axe.