Trump Admin Exempts Trump’s Ads Thanking Himself From DOGE Review

It’s very important to the Trump administration that the government spend huge taxpayer dollars on ads that repeatedly thank Donald Trump while warning immigrants to leave or stay out of America. 

There was such “an unusual and compelling urgency” for this propaganda campaign that it could not be subject to competitive bidding rules, Trump officials say. Records show they also exempted the ads from review by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). 

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has budgeted up to $200 million for these ads so far. Speaking at a Conservative Political Action Conference dinner in February, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the ad campaign was Trump’s idea, and that he specifically asked her to thank him in the ads, which she does. “I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border,” she says Trump told her. 

As the Associated Press has reported, the Trump administration quietly bypassed a competitive bidding process as it selected contractors for the lucrative ad campaign, because the president declared a national emergency at the southern border upon taking office. 

“To aid in responding to this emergency, DHS requires an immediate domestic and international campaign to direct illegal aliens within the U.S. and its territories to leave immediately, and to discourage illegal immigration into the country,” Trump officials wrote. They claimed that “any delay” in starting the ad campaign “will allow illegal border crossings to continue to rise.”

Two contractors were selected — two consulting firms with ties to Republicans. Federal procurement data indicates the Trump administration has exempted both firms’ ad deals from DOGE’s sweeping “cost efficiency” review, which Trump initiated via executive order in late February.

The Trump executive order directs each agency head and DOGE staff to review discretionary spending through federal contracts and grants. The goal is to root out “waste, fraud, and abuse,” in order to “reduce overall federal spending or reallocate spending to promote efficiency and advance the policies of my administration.”

The order includes exemptions for contracts and expenditures related to immigration enforcement, law enforcement, and public safety, as well as emergency spending. The administration cited these provisions as it deemed payments to the two contractors working on Trump’s anti-immigrant ads exempt from DOGE’s review — even though the campaign is ultimately a pro-Trump propaganda blitz financed with the public’s money.  

“Thank you, President Donald J. Trump, for securing our border, for deporting criminal illegal immigrants, and for putting America first,” Noem says in the domestic version of the ad. “President Trump has a clear message for those that are in our country illegally, leave now, if you don’t, we will find you and we will deport you.” She adds that “under President Trump, America’s borders are closed to law-breakers.”

The international version of the ad is very similar, and also thanks Trump. In that version, Noem says, “Under President Trump, we are defending American families and restoring their safety,” and adds, “President Trump is making America safe again.”

While this spending is exempt from DOGE’s review, the administration has been halting funds appropriated by Congress — including disaster relief funds meant to go to states from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is part of DHS. Trump officials have continued to freeze these funds in defiance of a judge’s order. 

The Trump administration has more broadly been gutting the workforce, conducting mass firing campaigns, shuttering and pausing whole agencies, and eliminating key government functions everywhere. DOGE has been the tip of the spear — and workers involved with public safety haven’t been spared from the firings. ProPublica reported Monday that 700 Forest Service employees who were part of DOGE’s firings of probationary worries are red-card-carrying staffers trained to assist firefighters during wildfires, including by carrying out prescribed burns. 

DOGE, meanwhile, regularly crows about all of the contracts it has identified to cancel. 

On Friday, DOGE posted on X, Musk’s platform, that the General Services Administration’s “IT team just saved $1M per year by converting 14,000 magnetic tapes (70 yr old technology for information storage) to permanent modern digital records.”

The post received the following community note on X: “Despite its age, magnetic tape is still highly favorable for long-term, static data archives. It offers cost-effectiveness (cheaper than disk/cloud), longevity (outlasts disk drives), offline security (resists cyber threats), and high capacity (up to 50TB per tape).”