Trump Guts Voice Of America News Agency, Cites Coverage He Didn’t Like As Justification

Voice of America staff were locked out of their offices on Saturday—unable to complete planned reporting—after President Donald Trump signed an executive order gutting the government-run news agency that the White House has referred to as “radical propaganda.”

VOA was founded in 1942 in part to counter Nazi propaganda.

The move impacts all full-time staffers at the VOA and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting, which runs Radio and Television Martíore, and is poised to have a devastating effect on practically all operations under the United States Agency for Global Media—the parent entity of VOA and the department targeted by Trump’s Friday evening order.

According to the agency, which is fully funded by federal dollars, broadcasters and their sister networks reach 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week, “often in some of the world’s most restrictive media environments.”

“I am deeply saddened that for the first time in 83 years, the storied Voice of America is being silenced,” VOA director Michael Abramowitz wrote in a LinkedIn post. He shared that his entire staff of 1,300 journalists, producers, and assistants had been put on administrative leave, including himself. “Even if the agency survives in some form, the actions being taken today by the Administration will severely damage Voice of America’s ability to foster a world that is safe and free and in doing so is failing to protect U.S. interests,” he said.

A statement released by the White House following the executive order details news coverage by VOA as justification for the defunding, including an article defining white privilege after the murder of George Floyd, a story about whether Russia perpetuated allegations against Hunter Biden to benefit Trump, and a segment on LGBT migrants.

The order, entitled “Continuing the Reduction Of The Federal Bureaucracy,” called for multiple other departments to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,” including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, and the Minority Business Development Agency.

In December, Trump announced that Republican Kari Lake, a former news anchor who ran twice for office in Arizona on a MAGA platform and lost both times, was his pick to serve as director of Voice of America—though that didn’t happen. A couple of months later, Trump named her a senior adviser to the USAGM.

On Saturday morning, Lake took to X, shared a link to the executive order, and told employees to check their emails—where they would find news of being terminated.

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Grant Turner, the former chief financial officer at the USAGM, called it “Bloody Saturday” for the agency and its networks. He left the agency in January.

“From what I hear, this is shaping up to be a really sad day. USAGM networks share important news, information and American values around the world,” Turner said. “It took decades to build this goodwill and an audience of hundreds of millions every week. Seeing arsonists just set fire to it all is awful.”

While the pro-democracy, government-funded news organization has received criticism for not being fully independent in its journalism and beholden to pro-America sentiment, it is also considered to be a lifeline for countries with strict media control. As NPR reported Saturday, “the agency has severed all contracts for the privately incorporated international broadcasters it funds, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.”

Reporters at Radio Free Asia work “on the oppression of Uighur Muslims by Chinese authorities helped to bring their plight to international attention,” NPR’s David Folkenflik wrote.

Trump administration’s move to defund the newsroom points to his long-history of railing against media he views as unfriendly.

Between 2015 and early 2021, Trump posted negatively about the media more than 2,490 times on Twitter, according to a U.S. Press Freedom Tracker database. And, only counting online posts, Trump has called individual networks, the press, or “fake news” the “enemy of the people” tens of times. Since taking office, Trump’s administration has removed four major news organizations—The New York Times, NBC News, NPR, and Politico—from their in-house offices at the Pentagon and restricted which outlets and individual reporters are allowed into the press pool covering the president.

Trump and his ally, the richest man in the world Elon Musk, also singled out a Washington Post journalist by name on social media and called for him to be fired after he critiqued the pair.

Several VOA staffers who were locked out on Saturday spoke with news organizations, requesting anonymity to protect themselves from retaliation.

“The Voice of America has been silenced, at least for now,” a veteran correspondent told CNN. “It’s not just about losing your income,” a Radio Free Asia employee said in an interview with France 24. “We have staff and contractors who fear for their safety. We have reporters who work under the radar in authoritarian countries in Asia. We have staff in the US who fear deportation if their work visa is no longer valid.”

“Wiping us out with the stroke of a pen,” the employee continued, “is just terrible.”