Customs and Border Protection spent $20 million on Trump campaign ads before the midterms. Democratic appropriators noticed this. Everyone else was busy checking their portfolio for the nineteenth time that day.
The Wall Street Journal reports DHS funded the whole thing. Government money paid for government ads featuring the guy running the government. Circular logic meets circular spending. The retail trader reading this just checked if there's a Homeland Security ETF. There isn't. Go back to losing money on tech stocks.
Twenty million dollars. That buys a lot of airtime. That also buys a lot of other things, but we went with airtime. CBP figured the best use of their budget was television commercials. Not border security equipment. Not personnel. Commercials. The kind that play during Judge Judy and make you reach for the remote.
Democratic appropriators expressed concern. They used words like "inappropriate" and "misuse of funds." Strong language from people who appropriate funds for a living. Meanwhile some guy in Wisconsin saw the ad between Wheel of Fortune and thought nothing of it because he was trying to figure out if he should buy more GameStop.
The midterms came and went. The ads ran. The money got spent. DHS will get another budget next year. They'll spend that too. Probably on more ads. Maybe some fencing. Definitely not on anything that would prevent a retail trader from making catastrophically bad decisions with his Robinhood account.
This is how government works. You take taxpayer money, you spend it on things, sometimes those things are ads for the person who appointed the people who spent the money. It's not a scandal. It's just expensive performance art funded by people who thought their taxes were going to roads.
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