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At least three timeslots this last week, TV viewers have been greeted with a taxpayer funded Trump ad where he vows to beat Communism and Marxism while bragging about tax cuts and creating factory jobs. After Dana White makes an appearance, the bottom of the screen shows the bitter disclaimer of "Paid for by the U.S. Government".¹
The ad-tracking firm AdImpact estimated the first spot at $14,000 when it debuted on Fox News and Newsmax on Sept. 23.¹ Two days later the estimate topped $443,000.⁵ By Monday the three ads together had run up at least $1.7 million, and the midterms are just five weeks off.⁴
Lame Excuse
The White House says these can't be campaign ads because Trump isn't running this fall and nobody gets told to vote.⁵ Trump has spent the summer asking supporters to "pretend I'm on the ticket," which makes that line hard to swallow.³ The defense also skips over what the law actually says. Under the Hatch Act, a federal employee can't use the power of their job to try to change how an election turns out.⁶
The president is carved out of the Hatch Act.⁷ His staff isn't. The people who wrote these spots, edited them and paid for the airtime are all covered. That's the core of a complaint Public Citizen sent last week to the Office of Special Counsel and the Government Accountability Office, which argues the ads were a White House staff project run on public resources.² Rep. Jamie Raskin has accused anyone involved of violating the Hatch Act and suggested the spending could be a criminal misuse of federal property.⁴ This administration has been down this road. After Trump's first term, OSC concluded at least 13 of his officials had violated the Hatch Act, many of them during the 2020 Republican convention, which was held largely at the White House.⁸ Mark Meadows, then chief of staff, brushed off the findings by arguing regular Americans didn't care.⁸
Poor Comparisons
The White House does have a point worth taking seriously. Administrations from both parties have bought ad time with public money. Obama promoted Affordable Care Act enrollment and Biden promoted COVID shots.¹⁶ GAO has also approved plenty of agency advertising, including 2010 HHS television spots that clearly identified who made them and didn't glorify anybody.¹⁴ These new ads also avoid naming a candidate or party.
Those older campaigns still had something to tell people, whether it was a signup deadline or where to find a vaccine. Public Citizen points out that the new spots hardly touch on any government program.² Republicans have noticed too. Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy argued public officials shouldn't be buying ads to promote themselves with public money.¹⁷ North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis likened the ads to the kind of thing Viktor Orbán's government ran in Hungary.⁷ Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie mocked the White House's legal defense by comparing the ads to what goes on in banana republics.¹⁶ Richard Painter, who handled ethics for Bush's White House, told reporters the ads might rise to the level of impeachment.¹⁸
Consequences
The law already spells out the punishment for the people behind these ads. Under the Hatch Act, a violator can be fired, demoted, suspended, fined up to $1,000 or barred from federal jobs for five years.²⁰ GAO has also ruled that spending money in violation of the propaganda ban means spending money an agency never had, which breaks the Antideficiency Act.¹⁵ An official who does that knowingly and willfully can be fined $5,000 and sent to prison for up to two years.²¹ Raskin's theft argument also has a statute behind it, since misusing more than $1,000 in federal property carries up to 10 years in prison.⁴ ²² If GAO finds the ad buys broke the propaganda ban, whoever signed off on them should face a criminal referral to the Justice Department.
The one-time payments go out weeks before the midterms, but anyone on a Medicare Advantage plan is excluded. In Wisconsin, that's most people on Medicare.
