The DNC Sued Over $20 Million in Trump Ads. The Same Legal Test Already Sank a Bush Agency and Obama's EPA.

The Democratic National Committee filed suit against the Trump administration on October 7, asking a federal judge in Washington to block a $20 million television ad campaign and declare it an illegal use of taxpayer money. The complaint says the ads were paid for with funds Congress set aside for Customs and Border Protection commemorative events, including memorials for officers killed in the line of duty. Common Cause filed a separate suit the same week in the Southern District of New York, arguing the same ads fail a legal standard for government speech that federal appropriations law has enforced since the 1950s.

What the ads actually show

The campaign ran three spots. One pairs a choir singing over Trump imagery with a narrator describing the dangers of communism. A second uses Mount Rushmore footage to describe what it calls a golden age of America. A third shows Trump warning of a final battle against what he calls the deep state. None asks a viewer to vote, donate, or call a lawmaker, and that absence is the detail the White House leaned on in a September 25 release calling the spots public service announcements rather than campaign ads because, in the administration's words, there is no call to action.

A test that has already caught a Republican agency and a Democratic one

Appropriations law has barred federal agencies from spending money on publicity or propaganda since the 1950s, and the Government Accountability Office settled on the operating standard in a 1988 decision: material prepared by an agency or its contractors and circulated as the ostensible position of outside parties counts as covert propaganda. The office has applied that standard against both parties. In 2005, it found the Bush Department of Education broke the law by paying commentator Armstrong Williams $240,000 to promote the No Child Left Behind Act on his television show without disclosing the arrangement, writing that "the concealment of, or failure to disclose, the agency's role in sponsoring the material" was the core of the violation.

The office reached similar findings against the Obama administration's EPA in 2015, over a social media push for a water-pollution rule that reached 1.8 million users without identifying the agency as the source, and against the first Trump administration in 2018, over Affordable Care Act messaging. Four administrations, two parties, the same statute.

The defense, and who's rejecting it

The White House's written defense does not cite the GAO's covert propaganda standard directly. It instead compares the spots to past administrations' public campaigns, stating that administrations of both parties have used public service announcements to explain policy and make the case for the nation's direction, and pointing to examples under Bush, Obama, and Biden. Four ethics lawyers, including former Bush White House chief ethics lawyer Richard Painter and former Obama ethics counsel Norman Eisen, wrote that the comparison does not hold and that the spots amount to covert attempts directed at the success of the Republican party, the exact category GAO punished in 2005 and 2015.

“I just think you're not going to find any correlation at all.”

Vanderbilt political scientist John Geer, who studies presidential advertising, said the comparison to past campaigns does not survive contact with the content of these ads: "The ads are different enough so that I personally don't buy the argument."

What's still unresolved

CBP's own leadership was excluded from the decision to place the ad buy, according to NBC News's reporting on the DNC complaint, raising a procurement question separate from the propaganda claim: whether the spending bypassed the agency's normal contracting chain of command as well as the publicity rule. Neither lawsuit, as filed, specifies whether the plaintiffs are seeking repayment of the money already spent, only a court order blocking further taxpayer-funded airings. The ad buy itself is scheduled to end this week regardless, with outside groups, including MAGA Inc., assuming the cost of any additional spots.

“Americans deserve better than to have their hard-earned tax dollars used for Trump's illegal schemes.”

A Reuters/Ipsos poll taken before the suits were filed, and reported by Al Jazeera, found 86 percent of respondents opposed using public money for the campaign. That number will not decide the case in court, but it may decide how fast Congress acts if the two judges hearing these suits don't rule before the midterms.