President Trump put up another taxpayer-paid television ad on Sept. 30. The spot, first flagged by political ad-buying firm Medium Buying, flaunts a flashing series of missile strikes and F-22 jet acrobatics interlaced over bombastic speech from Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
It’s like a free-for-all.
Donald Trump’s first administration reallocated billions in funding from the military and Treasury to construct a border wall Congress had explicitly declined to fund.
His second administration has been equally brazen and blatant in ignoring Congress’ power of the purse.
Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently funded enhanced security for himself by taking about $12 million from the department’s Office of Minority Health. The Wall Street Journal noted that the Reagan administration created the Office after a landmark report showed that Black life expectancy in the U.S. was shorter than white Americans’ and that Black babies were more likely than white babies to die.
Meanwhile, Trump’s administration has thrown the 433 sites managed by the National Park Service into turmoil, shifting funding and workers to pet projects in Washington, according to the New York Times. Earlier this year, the administration used at least $67 million generated by entrance fees from parks to help fund projects in Washington favored by Mr. Trump, like the botched Reflecting Pool repairs.
In August, the Washington Post reported that to assemble funding in that account, the White House budget office authorized a series of transfers from the U.S. Secret Service and the White House Military Office totaling $500 million, planning and budget documents indicate, while an additional $305 million came from private donations., primarily using taxpayer dollars. Instead of seeking Congressional appropriations, the administration has pieced together funding from other agencies and private donors and directed it to an account intended routine maintenance of the executive mansion. To build the fund, the White House budget office authorized a series of transfers from the U.S. Secret Service and the White House Military Office totaling $500 million.
And now USA Today just reported that The Trump administration is using public dollars not appropriated for that purpose to produce and pay for a television ad that features President Trump urging Americans to “defeat communism,” while touting his economic record and personal resilience, as a choir in the background recites the verse “Love me. The ad reads “Paid for by the U.S. Government” at the end. “It appears to mark an extraordinary breach of White House practice under previous presidents separating public funding from political advertising,” USA Today observed.
Despite criticism, another government-funded political ad promoting Trump aired on Fox News Sunday, during “Saturday Night Live,” “Fox News Sunday,” and several college and NFL football games. The 30-second ad showed a grim-faced Trump walking down a hallway as audio from a rally speech played in the background. “This is the final battle,” Trump says. “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state.”
“We will cast out the communists, Marxists, and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all,” Trump says in the ad.
The taxpayer money used to fund the ads that started airing last week came from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, an arm of DHS that oversees the Border Patrol and customs and immigration at airports, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Four high-ranking House and Senate Democrats wrote a letter to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles demanding the Trump administration immediately take an earlier ad off the air off the air and report exactly how many taxpayer dollars were spent creating and airing the illegal political propaganda. “If President Trump wants people to love him, he can pay for it himself,” the letter said.
“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and utterly illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars,” the lawmakers wrote, noting the ad constitutes a blatant violation of Section 718 of Division E of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2026, which forbids any federal funding from supporting propaganda, as well as other federal laws.
The White House has responded that the ad is nothing more than “a public service announcement”.
Trump’s diversion of federal funds for purposes not explicitly appropriated by Congress has been a central flashpoint across both of his presidential terms. “Critics and lawmakers argue that the administration’s actions bypass federal law, while the administration has relied on emergency powers, executive orders, and legal maneuvers to pause, claw back, or redirect funds to fit its policy goals,” says international law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.
Congress needs to reassert its power of the purse and its responsibility to the American people NOW!
UPDATE
The Washington Sun reported on Sept. 29, 2026 that on Sept. 19, the White House Office of Management and Budget gave Customs and Border Protection $20 million for “OBBBA commemorative events.” The next day, CBP awarded the advertising company LMD Agency Inc. a contract for $20 million for a “national media campaign.”
Three days later, the administration began running pro-Trump national ads featuring the president railing against communism and praising his past achievements. Lawmakers are pointing to the $20 million apportionment as an unauthorized use of funds, claiming the administration went around Congress to pay for an ad campaign that the law had deemed prohibited.
LMD Agency received the $20 million contract from the CBP’s public affairs office as part of a larger contracting vehicle the ad agency already has with the US Coast Guard.
That larger contracting vehicle is normally used for Coast Guard recruitment campaigns, according to a review of federal spending databases. Because LMD Agency already had a larger “indefinite delivery vehicle” contract, CBP did not have to run a separate solicitation process to award the contract.
