The Trump administration’s moves to gut much of the U.S. Agency for Global Media and its integrated government-funded news networks are priming overseas media consumers for exploitation by authoritarian regimes and influence campaigns, experts warn.
A USAGM press release on its elimination of non-statuatory work said the agency was “not salvageable” after President Donald Trump signed a late Friday executive order to severely reduce the size of the agency and the organizations it oversees, including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Asia.
“The U.S. Agency for Global media will continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency’s purview and shed everything that is not statutorily required,” said USAGM Senior Adviser Kari Lake.
“From top-to-bottom this agency is a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer—a national security risk for this nation—and irretrievably broken,” the press release said, noting that “$100s-of-millions” were being spent by the agency on “fake news companies”—an apparent reference to newswire services widely considered among the best and most neutral news outlets.
The effects of the order were felt immediately. In the VOA’s content-management systems, all folders with video clippings delivered by wire services including Agence France-Presse, Reuters, and the Associated Press were gone as of Saturday morning, a person familiar with the matter said, including live recordings like Trump’s recent meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. VOA’s video teams often rely on raw, unedited video from newswires for their news products, which are sent across various bureaus in USAGM’s network for distribution to audiences.
Termination notices for contractors flowed in over the weekend, according to an email viewed by Nextgov/FCW.
Full-time VOA staff were immediately put on administrative leave.
USAGM was established in 2018 as the successor to the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which was created in 1994 to oversee VOA and other U.S. international broadcasting before becoming an independent agency 15 years later.
VOA was created during World War II to counter Nazi propaganda, and repurposed during the Cold War to counter Soviet narratives in the West and behind the Iron Curtain. USAGM’s networks broadcast to some of the most restricted media environments in the world, with the aim of providing independent news to repressed audiences.
Radio Free Asia, for instance, provides uncensored news in Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, and Uyghur, covering several issues often censored in China. VOA Persian is one of the few independent sources of news available in Iran, where state-controlled outlets dominate. The Iranian government has jammed VOA broadcasts and harassed VOA-affiliated journalists.
“I definitely think there will be an incredible vacuum lost with VOA’s cessation,” said one person affected by the reductions announced this weekend, adding “a lot of what our stringers and reporters in bureaus outside of the United States focused on was specially China and Russia’s growing presence beyond their own borders.” They were granted anonymity due to fear of reprisal.
Many of the places the person’s teams worked in did not have news models akin to Western media outlets, with social media often limited due to reduced internet availability.
Stringers and staff reporters on the person’s team were some of the only people able to capture and relay Russia’s growing influence in Mali and Burkina Faso, and helped cover Moscow’s growing influence over repressive military regimes in those parts of West Africa, the person said.
Those views were echoed publicly by even the highest-level officials in USAGM’s units.
“The cancellation of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s grant agreement would be a massive gift to America’s enemies,” RFE/RL President and CEO Stephen Capus said Saturday. “The Iranian Ayatollahs, Chinese communist leaders and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the demise of RFE/RL after 75 years. Handing our adversaries a win would make them stronger and America weaker.”
Karen Kornbluh, a former RFE board chair, told Nextgov/FCW that if the U.S. withdraws its journalists and ceases providing news to people living under repressive regimes, an information vacuum “will be filled by our enemies” and weaken the nation.
RFE operates on a $142 million budget, while Iran, China, and Russia collectively spend an estimated $7 billion to $10 billion annually on global propaganda, Kornbluh said, adding that, over 75 years, RFE has painstakingly built trust and cultivated influential audiences to counter state-backed disinformation with independent journalism.
In Ukraine, RFE operates from the front lines of the war, she added. Nearly 29% of the population consumes information from RFE on a weekly basis. Its independent coverage includes covering corruption and has resulted in formal inquiries and the dismissals or resignations of top Ukrainian government officials, she noted.
“In Russia, despite the blocking of our websites, RFE reaches 10 million Russians every week — 8.7% of the Russian adult population,” Kornbluh said.
U.S. adversaries are acutely aware of the value that USAGM and its affiliates provide to parts of the world as a form of “soft-power projection,” said Max Lesser, a senior analyst focused on influence operations and emerging threats at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
“VOA and other USAGM-managed programs are not an obsolete relic of the Cold War-era. These efforts provide a critical function at a time when America’s adversaries wage aggressive information warfare against America’s allies and regions of critical national interest in Africa and the Global South,” he said. “USAGM-managed programs also provide a critical way to pierce through the protective shields of censorship that America’s adversaries have erected around their own people.”
Lesser also highlighted a recent joint reporting effort between VOA and Taiwan-based Doublethink lab that exposed a Chinese influence campaign pushing antisemitic tropes about Jews controlling core political institutions in the U.S. government.
In recent memory, foreign adversaries have sought to discredit USAGM. China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center last July published a factually inaccurate paper that claimed USAGM was issuing “gag orders” to U.S. media reporters to prevent them from truthfully covering an infamous Beijing-backed hacking group that’s been found inside troves of critical infrastructure around the country.
“We are not a propaganda agency and we do not, nor have we ever, sought to control, influence or silence any reporter, media entity or individual anywhere. This is completely antithetical to what we do,” then-USAGM CEO Amanda Bennett said last year when Nextgov/FCW inquired about that paper.
“The fact-based news and information our networks provide has earned unparalleled credibility among audiences worldwide, particularly because it counters the very kind of misinformation purported by authoritarian regimes as we’re seeing in this latest report. This is precisely why it is so critical for people to have access to unbiased information — to counter falsehoods like this,” Bennett said at the time.
Russian spin doctors have also praised USAGM’s dismantling. “Today is a holiday for my colleagues at RT and Sputnik because Trump suddenly announced the closure of Radio Liberty and Voice of America. This is a cool decision on his part,” said Margarita Simonyan, head of RT, the Russian state-sponsored media organization that U.S. intelligence determined to be a sophisticated, mainstay arm of the Kremlin’s military propaganda nexus. The Global Times, a Chinese state-backed news outlet, also approved the moves, calling VOA a “lie factory.”
National Press Club President Mike Balsamo said Monday the moves undermine America’s long-standing commitment to press freedom. “For decades, Voice of America has delivered fact-based, independent journalism to audiences worldwide, often in places where press freedom does not exist. Removing large numbers of its journalists at the same time as dismantling USAGM threatens the very foundation that has allowed VOA to operate without political interference.”
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