United States President Donald Trump’s administration has begun laying off staff at Voice of America (VOA) after signing an executive order to place nearly all employees at the state-funded media network on leave.
VOA employees working on a contractual basis on Sunday received an email informing them that they were being terminated effective March 31.
In the email, which was seen by Al Jazeera, the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) said contractors must “cease all work immediately” and were “not permitted to access any agency buildings or systems”.
“Contractors, including myself, at Voice of America have just received an email notifying us that our contracts will be terminated effective March 31, 2025,” Misha Komadovsky, the White House correspondent for VOA’s Russian-language service, said in a post on X.
The move comes after Trump on Friday signed an executive order to effectively eliminate USAGM, which also hosts Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, along with six other federal agencies.
In a statement, The White House said the move would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda” and listed a series of criticisms of the outlet by conservative media and lawmakers.
Trump’s directive is the latest in a series of moves to draw condemnation from media freedom advocacy groups, including Reporters Without Borders and the Committee to Protect Journalists, which branded the latest order “dystopian”.
Last month, the Trump administration began barring The Associated Press news agency from events over its refusal to use “Gulf of America” after his executive order changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico, and announced that it would decide which journalists and media organisations can participate in media pools.
VOA and other US-funded outlets have long faced accusations of liberal bias from Trump and his allies, including cost-cutting tsar Elon Musk, who last month claimed the broadcasters were made up of “radical left crazy people talking to themselves”.
During Trump’s first term, the White House accused VOA of “speaking for America’s adversaries – not its citizens”.
In 2020, a federal judge ruled that Trump-appointed USAGM CEO Michael Pack acted unconstitutionally by investigating journalists at the news service over their alleged bias.
Brian Padden, a former VOA bureau chief in South Korea and Indonesia who retired in 2020, said it was “galling” to hear the Trump administration accuse VOA of disseminating anti-US propaganda.
“In the course of my reporting, I have been shot at, roughed up, and even nearly decapitated by an exploding helicopter in Eastern Ukraine,” Padden said on Facebook on Sunday.
“In 2014, I was harassed by Pro-Russian activists or militants in Ukraine who accused me and my VOA TV crew of being agents of pro-American propaganda. Both Musk and the Russian militants are wrong. VOA does not do propaganda. VOA reports the news, which includes the perspective of both proponents and critics of the president.”
Since Friday’s executive order, VOA’s broadcasts have gone quiet or been replaced by music in multiple regions, including parts of Asia and the Middle East.
Established during World War II to combat propaganda from Nazi Germany, VOA operated in more than 40 languages and claimed a weekly audience of more than 354 million people worldwide.
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