Border Money Should Not Pay for the President’s Midterm Ads

About five weeks before a national election, viewers across the United States have been seeing television ads starring President Trump. One borrows from a 2024 campaign spot in which a narrator invites the audience to join his final battle against the deep state. The ads carry no campaign disclaimer, because no campaign paid for them. Taxpayers did.

According to federal budget records reported by ABC News and the Washington Post, the White House budget office on September 19 shifted about $20 million into a Homeland Security account for commemorative events, drawing on money that Congress had approved for border security in last year’s tax and spending law. The next day, federal contract data show, the department awarded a $20 million national media campaign contract to a Maryland advertising firm. Within days the ads were on the air. The ad-tracking firm AdImpact estimated, in figures NBC News reported on September 30, that more than $1.7 million had been spent on airtime.

The White House calls these public service announcements, educational and unapologetically patriotic, and compares them to past government spots promoting Medicare drug coverage or health insurance sign-ups. That comparison is the administration’s best argument, and it deserves a fair hearing: governments of both parties have long used advertising to tell the public about programs, and presidents often appear in that material.

But the comparison fails on its own terms. A Medicare ad tells you how to enroll in something. These ads, as NBC News described them, feature the president talking about defeating communism and battling the deep state. They point to no program, no deadline and no service. The watchdog group Public Citizen has argued in a complaint to the Federal Communications Commission that federal law bars appropriated money from being spent on propaganda, self-promotion or partisan advertising, and that these spots meet none of the tests for a genuine public notice.

The concern is not confined to Democrats. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, a Republican, said the ads should not be paid for with taxpayer dollars. Anna Gomez, the lone Democrat on the FCC, warned that public money promoting a political message this close to an election is a problem. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, by contrast, laughed off the propaganda question and said the ads raise no red flags.

There is also the matter of where the money came from. Congress approved those dollars for the border. Whatever one thinks of the administration’s immigration agenda, it has argued for years that border security is an emergency demanding every resource. Diverting part of that budget to put the president’s face on television undercuts that case and treats a congressional appropriation as a slush fund.

This page believes in a strong executive branch that answers to the law, and in elections decided by voters rather than by whoever controls the Treasury. The remedy here is not complicated. Appropriations Committee members from both parties should demand a full accounting of the transfer, the contract and the airtime. Congress should write explicit limits on government advertising featuring officeholders in the months before a federal election. The president has said he would gladly pay for the ads himself if anyone objects. Plenty of people object. His campaign can write the check.