Jackie Speier, who represented California’s 14th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives from 2008 to 2023 and now serves on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, used a post on X on Sunday, September 27, 2026, to accuse President Donald Trump of illegally spending taxpayer money on a government-funded advertisement she characterized as a “vanity campaign ad.”
Speier’s post, published at 6:44 p.m. on September 27, 2026, read in its entirety:
“Is anyone in Congress going to call the President out for literally wasting taxpayer money on his vanity campaign ad? This is ILLEGAL! Don’t touch our taxpayer $. Use your own PAC $!!”
The post came in response to reporting that an advertisement nearly identical to one from Mr. Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign had begun airing again over the weekend, this time paid for with public funds rather than campaign donations. The spot, a somber black-and-white ad in which Mr. Trump vows to “expel the warmongers” from government and fight the “deep state,” originally ran during the final weeks of the 2024 election cycle.
Background: The Ad’s Return
According to The New York Times, the advertisement returned to television screens across the country on Saturday, September 26, 2026, airing during “Fox News Sunday,” “Saturday Night Live,” and multiple college and NFL football broadcasts, including the Seattle Seahawks–Washington Commanders game and the Ohio State–Illinois matchup. The version that aired this weekend concluded with an on-screen disclaimer reading “Paid for by the U.S. Government,” distinguishing it from its original 2024 airing, which was funded by Mr. Trump’s campaign.
The spot is the third in a series of pro-Trump advertisements funded with public money in recent weeks. The first, which debuted roughly two weeks earlier, showed the president vowing to defeat “socialism and communism and Marxism” and was set to the song “Love Me.” A second ad featured footage and remarks from his July 4 address at Mount Rushmore. The most recent ad, ethics experts told The New York Times, represents a more flagrant violation than its predecessors because it directly repurposes footage originally produced for Mr. Trump’s political campaign.
Ethics Experts Weigh In
Norm Eisen, a former White House special counsel for ethics and government reform under President Barack Obama who has since brought multiple lawsuits against the Trump administration, told The New York Times that “the president and his administration have gone from breaking the law to trampling it,” adding that “the prior ad was bad enough, but this one openly repurposes prior political conduct.”
Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush and current law professor at the University of Minnesota, went further, telling the Times in a phone interview that the use of federal funds for the ads could constitute an “abuse of power” and “an impeachable offense.” Painter said, “This is very dangerous. We do not allow government-sponsored propaganda in the United States.” He called on Congress to demand reimbursement for the spending.
Margaret Dylus-Yukins, senior legal counsel for ethics at the nonpartisan watchdog group the Campaign Legal Center, said the advertisement runs counter to the intent of federal law governing political activity by government employees, stating that “a divisive campaign commercial paid for by the U.S. government defies the Hatch Act’s very purpose.”
The Hatch Act Question
The Hatch Act, passed in 1939, bars federal government employees from making political statements in their official capacity. The president himself is exempt from the law, but ethics experts noted that any government employees involved in producing or placing the ad could face liability under the statute if their involvement is established.
Bipartisan Criticism
Criticism of the ad campaign has not been confined to Democrats. Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” that no public official, including Mr. Trump, “should spend public money on private ads for themselves,” adding that “the White House sees it differently.”
Four Democratic members of Congress — Senators Patty Murray and Jack Reed, and Representatives Rosa DeLauro and Steny Hoyer — sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on Thursday, September 24, 2026, demanding that the administration take the ads down and disclose their production and airtime costs. The lawmakers wrote that “this is the sort of government propaganda one might expect in North Korea, not the United States of America, and it is an egregious and illegal misuse of Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars.”
The White House Response
The White House has defended the advertisements as public messaging rather than political campaigning. In a statement reissued Sunday, the administration described the spots as “public service announcements” intended for “reminding Americans to love their country and understand what makes it worth defending, at home, at our borders, and abroad.” The statement added that the ads contain no “call to action.”
In its own defense of the campaign, the White House website has published a page citing precedents from past administrations, including wartime messaging under President Woodrow Wilson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Medicare-related ad campaign under President George W. Bush, an anti-drug-use campaign, and the Biden administration’s push to encourage COVID-19 vaccination.
Painter dismissed the comparison as weak, noting that in 2004 the General Accounting Office — the investigative arm of Congress now known as the Government Accountability Office — found that the Bush administration’s Medicare ads violated federal appropriations law by portraying the legislation favorably. “They really shouldn’t have done it the way they did,” Painter told the Times, referring to the Bush-era ad, which predated his own time at the White House. “Even though it’s nowhere near as bad as this. Nowhere near.”
Spending Figures and Political Context
According to modeled estimates from the ad-analytics firm AdImpact, the most recent advertisement is backed by more than $70,000 in airtime spending, while the three government-funded pro-Trump ads combined have cost more than $1 million to air in recent days. AdImpact separately estimated that Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign spent roughly $60,000 to promote the original version of the ad online between October 18 and November 2, 2024.
The advertisements have surfaced as Mr. Trump’s administration continues to prosecute a war against Iran with no clear resolution in sight, and as rising prices tied to the conflict threaten Republican prospects in the upcoming November midterm elections. Speier’s post did not address the war directly but focused specifically on the funding mechanism behind the ad, framing the issue as a matter of taxpayer accountability rather than the underlying policy debate over the conflict.
Speier’s Track Record on Government Oversight
During her fifteen years in the House, Speier built a record focused on military and government accountability, serving on the House Armed Services Committee, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. Her September 27 post continues a pattern of public statements from Speier scrutinizing the use of public funds and government transparency, though it marks one of her more direct confrontations with the current administration since leaving Congress.
As of Sunday evening, neither the White House nor Mr. Trump had issued a direct response to Speier’s post, and it remained unclear whether any sitting members of Congress would formally act on her call for accountability.