The money paying for the Trump ads on your television came out of the border security budget. The White House budget office moved it on September 19. There is $20 million set aside, more than $2.5 million has already gone to airtime, and one of the three ads is a recycled commercial from his 2024 campaign.
What is running, and where
There are now three of these spots, all paid for by the US government.
- The original anti-communism ad, which we covered Friday when the buy was $14,000 on Fox News and Newsmax.
- Love Me, a 30-second cut of rapid Trump images over audio of him denouncing communism and socialism, with on-screen text about administration accomplishments like reigniting American manufacturing. It is set to the song Love Me by JMSN, with a choir singing the title.
- Final Battle, showing Trump walking through a hall while his voice says this is the final battle.
On Sunday they ran inside NFL broadcasts. The Seahawks-Commanders game. The Browns-Panthers game. Also Fox News Sunday.
Where the money came from
When we first wrote about these ads, the biggest unanswered question was which appropriation was paying. The White House would not say. It has now been reported, and the answer is worse than most of the guesses.
- $20 million has been allocated for the ad effort.
- The money is Department of Homeland Security funding, drawn from money in the One Big Beautiful Bill that was designated for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
- OMB Director Russ Vought moved the money on September 19.
- AdImpact data shows more than $2.5 million spent on airtime for the three ads over seven days. The real figure may be higher depending on how networks are classified.
- Every ad carries the line Paid for by the U.S. Government.
So the funds Congress appropriated for border enforcement are buying television time for commercials about the president.
One of the ads is a repurposed campaign commercial
This is the detail that collapses the official defense.
The administration calls these public service announcements, comparable to past government campaigns about Medicare, the Affordable Care Act or Covid vaccines.
One of the three spots closely resembles a black-and-white video from Trump’s own 2024 presidential campaign, showing him walking down a hallway while his voice warns of a final battle against his enemies.
A public service announcement tells you to get a vaccine or check your Medicare enrollment. This one was made to elect somebody, and then the government bought it a second time with border money.
The legal complaints
This is no longer just an argument about taste.
Public Citizen has filed complaints with the Government Accountability Office and the Office of Special Counsel. The allegation is twofold: that the ads violate the laws barring taxpayer money from being spent on propaganda, and that they violate the Hatch Act, which prohibits using federal resources for political activity.
There is also a formal letter. On September 25, the top appropriators in both chambers wrote to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, copying OMB Director Russell Vought: Rep. Rosa DeLauro, Sen. Patty Murray, Rep. Steny Hoyer and Sen. Jack Reed.
They cite Section 718 of Division E of the Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026, which is not vague:
No part of any appropriation contained in the act or any other Act shall be used directly or indirectly, including through a private contractor, for publicity or propaganda purposes within the United States not heretofore authorized by Congress.
Section 718, Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2026
They asked for three things: pull the ad, discipline the federal employees who made it, and produce a full accounting of every federal dollar spent creating and airing it. That third demand exists because the first two are unenforceable and the money question is the only one with a paper trail.
Rep. Jamie Raskin has publicly questioned the legality. Per CNBC, the scrutiny is bipartisan.
The White House position is that these are educational public service announcements, that they are patriotic rather than political, and that they cannot be campaign ads because Trump is not on the ballot.
The Republicans saying it out loud
This is not breaking along the usual line, and the words being used are unusually blunt for members of the president’s own party.
Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana put it plainly.
I don’t think any public official, including President Trump or Kristi Noem or John Kennedy, should spend public money on private ads for themselves.
Sen. John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana
Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called it inappropriate and compared it to the playbook of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky said this is what happens in banana republics.
Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on Senate Appropriations and one of the four who signed the September 25 letter, was blunter.
A shockingly corrupt misuse of taxpayer dollars.
Sen. Patty Murray
Democrats have also pressed DHS Secretary Mullin on whether he discussed using the department’s money for the ads with Trump directly. CNN has reported, citing a source, that Trump personally helped orchestrate the ads, including selecting imagery and video.
Kennedy naming Kristi Noem in that sentence was not an accident, and it points at the bigger number.
Why $920,000 may be the small number
In March, DHS was found to have spent $220 million on an ad campaign featuring then-Secretary Kristi Noem, including the spot of her on horseback near Mount Rushmore telling people in the country illegally to leave.
The contract went to a firm with ties to Noem and her political operation. Itemized invoices released by Senate Democrats included $20,000 in horse rentals, thousands more for hair and makeup, over $100,000 in labor and a $60,000 signing bonus. She was grilled about it by senators of both parties and was out at DHS by the end of that month.
DHS has defended the campaign, crediting it with 2.2 million self-deportations and $39 billion in savings, figures that come from the department itself and have not been independently verified.
Set the two side by side. The NFL ads are less than half of one percent of what DHS spent. If a million dollars of public money buying football airtime is a scandal, then $220 million was something else entirely, and the thing that actually ended it was not a law. It was a horse rental line item that made a good headline.
What happens if the GAO agrees
Worth knowing before anyone waits on this, because the answer is deflating.
When the GAO finds an agency spent money on prohibited publicity or propaganda, the finding is that the agency also violated the Antideficiency Act, because the appropriation was never legally available for that purpose. The agency is then required to report the violation to the President and to Congress.
Read that again. The remedy for an administration illegally spending public money to promote itself is that the administration writes a letter to itself.
There is no fine. The GAO cannot claw the money back and cannot charge anyone. Criminal penalties under the Antideficiency Act exist on paper and have essentially never been used. The GAO has issued these findings before, against the Department of Education over the Armstrong Williams contract, against CMS, against the EPA over social media, and in each case the finding was the consequence.
Enforcement of all of it depends on the executive branch policing itself. That is the actual state of the law.
Bannon has been saying the quiet part
The ads are not arriving in a vacuum. They are arriving while the most prominent voice in the movement keeps telling Republicans they are losing.
Steve Bannon has predicted the party loses its Senate majority in the midterms. He has pointed at his own side’s pollsters, Rich Baris and Mark Mitchell, saying Republicans are in trouble. His diagnosis is not about Democrats.
You have a massive lack of enthusiasm among the base.
Steve Bannon
He has also told a room of conservatives that many of them could face jail time if Republicans lose the midterms and then 2028.
Put the two together and the ad campaign reads differently. A movement that believed it was winning would not need the federal government buying airtime in NFL games six weeks out.
The BeezLoop Take
Take the White House defense seriously for one paragraph, because it is not frivolous. Administrations of both parties run public service campaigns. Trump is not on the ballot in November. And a president talking about American values in a government spot is not automatically a campaign expenditure.
It collapses on contact with the ads themselves. A spot scored to an indie R&B song, with a choir singing love me over rapid-cut images of the president and text listing his accomplishments, is not informing the public about anything. There is no service in it. It is a campaign ad with a federal seal on the invoice, and the fact that the president is not personally on the ballot does not change what it is doing to the races that are.
The Hatch Act and Section 718 complaints are the part to watch rather than the outrage, but watch them with low expectations. Those laws exist because everyone understood a century ago that an incumbent party with access to the Treasury could simply outspend everyone using public money. The GAO and the Office of Special Counsel will now either enforce them or demonstrate that they are decorative.
We would put money on decorative, and that is the real story here rather than any individual ad. The penalty for this category of violation is a self-report. The $220 million DHS campaign did not end because a statute stopped it. It ended because a reporter found a horse rental on an invoice. When the only functioning enforcement mechanism in federal spending law is embarrassment, the constraint is not the law. It is whether the itemized receipts happen to be funny. Note also which department this is: DHS, again, for the second enormous self-promotional ad buy in a year.
And now that the account has been named, the question sharpens rather than closes. Congress appropriated that money for Customs and Border Protection. Whatever you think about border enforcement, and reasonable people think opposite things, Congress decided what the money was for and the executive branch decided something else. Twenty million dollars is not a rounding error at CBP. It is agents, equipment, or processing capacity that the legislature funded and the budget director redirected into commercials about his boss. That is the constitutional problem underneath the political one, and it does not depend on anyone’s view of immigration.
The repurposed campaign ad is the piece that should end the public service announcement argument in any honest forum. You cannot describe a commercial as an educational PSA when a nearly identical version of it was made to win an election. The administration is not claiming the resemblance is a coincidence. It is simply asserting the label and daring anyone to enforce the difference.
We would say the same about a Democratic administration and we want that on the record now, before it is convenient. If a future president runs government-funded spots set to music listing his accomplishments during the NFL season, the answer is the same. The test is not whether you like the message. It is whether the taxpayer is funding one side of an election.
And Bannon is the best evidence for what this actually is. He has been warning for months that the base is flat and the Senate is gone, citing friendly pollsters, telling allies they may go to prison. That is a man who does not think his side is ahead. Twenty million dollars of border money set aside for ads is what a campaign does when its own people are saying the enthusiasm is not there.
The question
Congress gave that $20 million to Customs and Border Protection. Who decided it should buy television instead, and what at CBP is not happening now? And if one of the three ads is a recycled 2024 campaign commercial, in what sense is any of this a public service announcement?
Background: we covered the first of these ads on Friday, when the buy was $14,000. Related: the DOJ is sending more than 1,000 monitors to polling places, and the Supreme Court cleared a voter purge database for use through November.
Sources: CNN · The Hill · CNBC · CBS News · Axios · House Appropriations Democrats, Sec. 718 letter · TIME · The Hill on the DHS ad spending · GAO on publicity or propaganda and the Antideficiency Act
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