The office needs the announcements to do its work. The only seller is the company in which the president is the largest shareholder.
WASHINGTON—Citing an operational requirement to receive presidential policy announcements without delay, a twelve-person Treasury Department office confirmed Friday that it has bought a Truth API subscription at $60,000 a month, making the federal government a paying customer for statements the Justice Department has repeatedly told federal courts are official presidential acts.
Trump Media and Technology Group put the product on sale August 1. It charges trading firms up to $100,000 a month for a feed carrying posts from high-profile Truth Social accounts, the president’s among them, ahead of the public timeline. The Intercept and the Freedom of the Press Foundation sued the president over the service on August 12, calling it “extraordinary, corrupt, and unconstitutional.” Company executives told investors that more than ten customers have signed, primarily high-frequency trading firms.
“Our economists were learning the tariff schedule from the afternoon coverage,” said Doreen Fenstermacher, 61, deputy director for information services at the Office of Executive Announcement Intake. “The firms that buy our data already had it. We were the last desk in this building to find out what the government had decided.”
What the Truth API Subscription Buys
The office has logged market-relevant executive communications for departmental economists since 2011, when the work meant clipping wire copy and time-stamping it by hand. Presidential announcements used to arrive through the same channel as everything else. Fenstermacher said that channel closed in stages, and no memorandum ever went around about it.
Two commercial tiers are on offer. The one the office bought carries standard delivery priority. Above it sits the $100,000 tier, built for firms that measure their advantage in milliseconds, and the office did not price that one.
The Justification Ran Two Sentences
Federal purchases above a dollar threshold require competition, or a written finding explaining why competition is impossible. Here the finding rests on the observation that one company sells the product. A memorandum supporting the award describes the feed as “the only available means to effectuate timely receipt of executive branch policy announcements.”
Accounting carried the Truth API subscription on the line for periodicals and reference services, beside two market-data terminals and a legal database. Fenstermacher said the coding question took longer than the purchase did. “There is no line for this,” she said. “Somebody had to pick one, and a subscription goes under periodicals.”
Where the Truth API Subscription Lands in the Queue
Staff began time-stamping receipts in the second week. An official at the office, who was not authorized to discuss internal measurements, said the logs set the moment a post arrives against the moment index futures move.
“The market has it first, every time, on the ones that matter,” the official said. “We are not measuring whether we are fast. We are measuring how far back in the line the government sits.”
A Company Losing Money on Nearly Everything Else
Trump Media reported a $238 million loss for the second quarter, tied mostly to cryptocurrency holdings, and executives said on August 10 that they would concentrate the company on Truth Social. The president is its largest shareholder through a trust controlled by his eldest son. Financial disclosures released in June showed he took in at least $2 billion last year.
Renee Jones, a Boston College professor and former senior official at the Securities and Exchange Commission, told NPR the arrangement appears to run afoul of insider trading law, since it hands paying customers information the president controls and others cannot get. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff asked the commission on July 28 to investigate. The SEC declined to comment. Shannon Devine, a spokeswoman for Trump Media, said the product “offers customers the fastest way to ingest publicly available Truth Social data.”
Wagering on the president’s words has already drawn one federal inquiry. Gabriel Perez, who has operated Trump’s teleprompter since 2016, is negotiating with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission over roughly $100,000 in Kalshi bets on whether particular phrases would turn up in more than a dozen speeches. An email from the White House Management Office on March 24 warned staff against using nonpublic government information on prediction markets. Newswax reported last week on a Treasury rule directing the department to delete ownership records that Congress has never repealed the law requiring.
Fenstermacher said the office has asked whether a second subscription would let two analysts watch the feed at once. A second subscription costs what the first one costs, and a request is being drafted. The office produces one work product, a daily log of what the president announced and when the department learned it. Fenstermacher said the second column was added in August.
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