The White House Spent $443,000 on One "Public Service" Ad. The Third One Ends With Trump Promising a "Final Battle."

A federal law that has barred agencies from spending appropriated money on "publicity or propaganda" since the 1950s is now the subject of a formal dispute over three taxpayer-funded television ads featuring President Trump. The third and latest, a 30-second spot called "Final Battle," aired during Fox's Sunday broadcasts of the Commanders-Seahawks and Panthers-Browns games on September 27, ending with the line the White House has attached to all three ads: "Paid for by the U.S. government." Spending on the first ad in the series had reached at least $443,000 as of September 25, according to the Associated Press. The White House has not disclosed what the second and third ads cost.

What the spending law actually says

The propaganda restriction is not new language written for this fight. Every annual appropriations bill since the Eisenhower administration has carried some version of it, and Congress has never defined "publicity or propaganda" in the statute itself, leaving the Government Accountability Office to interpret it case by case. The GAO's own doctrine, as laid out by Cornell Law School's Legal Information Institute, splits prohibited spending into three categories: agencies overstating their own importance, spending that serves a purely partisan purpose, and covert propaganda, meaning government-made material distributed as if it came from an independent source. The same doctrine notes the GAO applies an extremely deferential standard to the partisan-purpose category, finding a violation only when spending is completely devoid of any connection to official functions.

The letter, and the law it cites

On September 24, four senior Democratic appropriators, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, and Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles quoting the statute directly, then demanded the ad come off the air immediately, that the administration produce a complete accounting of all federal funds used to create and air it, and that federal employees who knowingly violated the law face discipline.

“This is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America.”

The White House's defense turns on one phrase

The administration's argument is narrower than simply denying the propaganda label. A White House spokesperson told reporters the ads "are clearly not political" because "the president is not on the ballot, and the ads don't have a call to action," describing the campaign as educational and unapologetically patriotic. Communications Director Steven Cheung made the same case on social media the day the third ad aired, writing that critics should not "get away with their lies about our epic Public Service Announcements that have been running on tv." That defense answers only one of the statute's three categories. It does not engage self-aggrandizement or partisan purpose, neither of which requires a call to action to apply.

Two Republicans broke from that defense the same day

Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana was asked about the ads on CBS's Face the Nation the day the third one aired, and said his home state already restricts the practice: "We have that rule in Louisiana. It works pretty well." Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina called the ad "inappropriate" and compared it to state media in Viktor Orban's Hungary, according to the Associated Press. Common Cause vice president for policy Carol Evans put the ethics question more bluntly, saying she did not think it took a legal scholar to wonder why the president needed taxpayer funds to promote his image this close to an election.

“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.”

The GAO has ruled against ads like this before, from both parties

The propaganda statute has produced real findings against real administrations before, just rarely and slowly. In 2004, the GAO ruled that Bush administration video news releases promoting a Medicare drug law, made with paid actors reading scripts formatted to look like independent news segments, violated the covert-propaganda ban. In 2015, the GAO found the EPA's social media push for a proposed water rule crossed the same line, acting more like an advocacy campaign than an agency informing the public. Neither finding stopped the spending while it was happening. The GAO can issue an opinion; it cannot pull an ad off the air or claw back money already spent, which is one reason this dispute is likely to play out in the press and in committee hearings before any legal body resolves it.

The fight lands about five weeks before the November midterms, and it runs through the same appropriations subcommittees, Reed's and Hoyer's among them, that will set the White House's budget again this winter. Whatever the GAO eventually concludes, the two sides arguing about the Final Battle ad this week are the same two sides who negotiate that spending bill next, propaganda clause included.