HHS Spends $300 Million in Taxpayer Funds on "Defeating Despair" COVID Ad Campaign Timed to Promote Trump Before Election

The Department of Health and Human Services launched a $300 million advertising campaign called “Defeating Despair” to promote the Trump administration’s COVID-19 response, with the effort conceived by political appointee Michael Caputo and timed to air before the November election. Caputo abruptly requisitioned the funds from the Centers for Disease Control budget and pursued celebrities including actor Dennis Quaid and singer CeCe Winans, with contractors vetting at least 274 potential celebrity contributors for their political views on issues including the 2016 election before allowing participation.

Background

Michael Caputo, HHS’s top spokesperson and a Trump loyalist with no public health background, largely conceived and organized the campaign. Documents obtained by the House Oversight Committee revealed that Caputo privately pitched the theme “Helping the President will Help the Country,” making explicit the campaign’s partisan political purpose. HHS was actively seeking to start airing the ads before Election Day on November 3, 2020, demonstrating the campaign’s connection to Trump’s reelection effort rather than legitimate public health objectives.

The $300 million was taken directly from CDC funding during a pandemic that had killed over 195,000 Americans by September 2020, redirecting desperately needed public health resources to political advertising. The campaign featured senior administration officials conducting recorded interviews with celebrities who had been politically vetted. Contractors screened potential participants for their stances on gay rights, gun control, and the 2016 election, ensuring that only ideologically acceptable celebrities would appear in taxpayer-funded ads.

After Politico’s investigative reporting exposed the campaign’s political nature, public outcry forced celebrities to withdraw their participation. Dennis Quaid, CeCe Winans, and others pulled out as the campaign’s partisan purpose became undeniable. HHS conducted an internal review and eventually scrapped the celebrity component entirely, though only after extensive public pressure made continuing the campaign politically untenable.

Significance

The “Defeating Despair” campaign represented one of the most expensive and blatant uses of taxpayer funds for partisan political purposes in modern American history. Caputo’s internal pitch document—“Helping the President will Help the Country”—provided documentary evidence of the campaign’s explicitly political objectives, contradicting HHS’s public claims that the ads served legitimate public health purposes.

The $300 million price tag exceeded the budgets of many federal programs and represented a massive diversion of CDC resources during an active pandemic that the Trump administration was failing to control. Using public health funds to promote Trump’s pandemic response—which was widely criticized as inadequate and resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths—exemplified the administration’s willingness to exploit every federal resource for political advantage.

The political vetting of celebrity participants revealed the campaign’s partisan nature beyond any doubt. Screening celebrities for their views on the 2016 election and other political issues had no conceivable public health justification and demonstrated that ideological loyalty to Trump, not public health expertise or effectiveness, determined participation in taxpayer-funded advertising.

This incident showed how Trump appointees wielded control over massive federal budgets to advance partisan political objectives while career public health professionals were sidelined. Caputo, who had no background in public health or federal service, commanded a $300 million budget and used it to create what amounted to a taxpayer-funded campaign advertisement for Trump’s reelection, timed for maximum political impact in the final weeks before the election. The campaign’s collapse after media exposure didn’t eliminate the underlying corruption—it merely prevented the most visible manifestation of HHS’s transformation into a Trump campaign operation.