No, USAID didn’t ‘subsidize’ CNN and MSNBC hosts’ salaries

Soon after MSNBC announced it would cancel Joy Reid’s prime-time show, conservative influencer Laura Loomer tied the move to U.S. Agency for International Development funding cuts. 

"Isn’t it funny how less than 2 weeks after USAID was defunded, majority of the leftist show hosts on CNN and MSDNC just had their shows canceled today?" Loomer wrote in a Feb. 24 X post, characterizing MSNBC as left-leaning by inserting the Democratic National Committee’s acronym into the network’s name. "They were literally subsidizing their multi million dollar salaries for their DEI commie propaganda with our tax dollars."

An Instagram post sharing a screengrab of Loomer’s X post was flagged as part of Meta’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and Threads.)

USAID is the federal government’s international humanitarian and development branch, and it’s been the target of misinformation since the Trump administration began dismantling it. The administration put thousands of USAID employees on administrative leave and fired others; some of these actions have been challenged in court. 

A search on USA Spending, a database for government grants and contracts, shows no USAID payments to CNN or MSNBC. A search of Google and the Nexis news database for reports about USAID funding CNN and MSNBC yielded no results. 

We contacted Loomer multiple times on X but did not receive a response.

Before MSNBC formally acknowledged its plans to cancel "The ReidOut," The New York Times on Feb. 23 cited unnamed sources who described the cancellation as part of a restructuring by the network’s new president, Rebecca Kutler. 

On Feb. 24, other news reports said MSNBC would end several other weekend shows, including those anchored by Katie Phang, Ayman Mohyeldin and José Diaz-Balart.

CNN changed its morning news lineup, but it hadn’t canceled any shows as of March 7. The network said Jan. 23 that it would lay off around 6% of its employees because of programming changes. 

NBCUniversal, which owns MSNBC, received payments of about $95,000 from 2012 to 2019 from the Department of Veteran Affairs and the National Institutes of Health for media services. An NBCUniversal spokesperson said she did not find that money from either agency spent went to MSNBC. 

It’s not unusual for government agencies to purchase advertising time on NBCUniversal networks. The NIH, for example, ran a commercial in January and February 2020 seeking clinical research volunteers. It also paid for booth space at a health and fitness expo sponsored by Washington D.C.’s NBC 4, WRC-TV, in 2018 and 2019.

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The Department of Government Efficiency “found a $6 million grant awarded to Whoopi Goldberg to ‘promote diversity on The View.’”

Warner Bros., which owns CNN, received Defense Department contracts worth more than $10 million from 2011 to 2025 for television programming. A Warner Bros. Discovery spokesperson told PolitiFact the company currently has a contract with the governments to supply programming to U.S. military bases overseas. The contract does not include CNN.

MSNBC spokesperson Hollie Tracz told PolitiFact that Loomer’s claim is "blatantly inaccurate." CNN spokesperson Emily Kuhn said Loomer’s statement has "zero truth to it."

Starting in early February, Trump and other conservative figures began misleadingly characterizing the federal government’s payments for news service digital subscriptions as payoffs for pro-Democrat or pro-USAID coverage. There’s no evidence of that.

Their claims first focused on what USA Spending showed to be federal payments to PoliticoPro, Politico’s news subscription service aimed primarily at businesses. It provides news, analysis and legislative tools for researchers, policymakers and lobbyists, and subscriptions can cost thousands of dollars.

Agencies across the federal government also paid for subscriptions to Politico, The New York Times, Reuters and The Associated Press.

We rate the claim that "USAID was subsidizing the salaries of CNN and MSNBC hosts who had their shows cancelled today," False.

PolitiFact Researcher Caryn Baird and Staff Writer Loreben Tuquero contributed to this report.