US District Judge Loren AliKhan ordered the Trump administration on 28 October to stop developing and airing television ads praising the president that were funded with $20 million in taxpayer money.
US District Judge Loren AliKhan in Washington on Wednesday ordered officials to stop developing and airing television ads praising President Donald Trump that were funded with $20 million in taxpayer money. The order, in the Democratic National Committee's case, bars the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Homeland Security from developing and airing the challenged ads and from distributing them, including through authorised third parties.
AliKhan found that officials likely used public dollars to unlawfully finance a national campaign in the final weeks before the November 2026 elections, and that the spending likely breached the federal ban on using appropriated money for publicity or propaganda purposes. She was unpersuaded, she wrote, by the administration's promise to stop using public money for the ads.
The sequence behind the ruling runs through September and October. OMB approved an extra $20 million on the evening of 19 September, about ninety minutes after DHS asked for it, and DHS issued a $20 million purchase order the next day, drawing on border-enforcement money from last year's One Big Beautiful Bill. By 11 October about $19 million in airtime had been bought, and ads including Final Battle and Mount Rushmore began airing on 23 September.
On 5 October Trump said his super PAC, MAGA Inc., would pay for the ads instead, but the judge found that promise went unfulfilled: the ads kept running with a Paid for by the US Government disclosure on 6, 7, 11 and 12 October. AliKhan wrote that this sequence gave the court reason to doubt assurances that the same injury would not recur, and that every public dollar spent on the ads allowed MAGA Inc. to conserve its resources for other efforts adverse to the DNC.
The order, the $20 million figure and the judge's central finding are confirmed by Bloomberg Law's reporting, and the detailed timeline of approvals, airtime purchases and disclosures is set out in the court's opinion as reported by Workers Rights News. A White House official later described the ruling as moot, saying the spots are now paid for by outside groups, a response that does not change the court's order itself.
The ruling follows a separate order from a federal judge in New York blocking the ads in a case brought by Common Cause and others, and it is not the end of the litigation. The administration must file a compliance report by 30 October, and both sides must propose a schedule for a longer-term injunction by 2 November, one day before the 3 November midterms that the ads were running ahead of.