Over the weekend, the Trump administration’s axe came down on a new target: the U.S. Agency for Global Media—and with it, significant sources of reporting on China.
In an executive order signed Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump called for the organization, along with six others, to be reduced to “the minimum presence and function required by law.” That had immediate consequences for two of the media outlets the agency funds, Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA), both of which have a decades-long track record of covering Beijing’s actions at home and abroad.
Over the weekend, the Trump administration’s axe came down on a new target: the U.S. Agency for Global Media—and with it, significant sources of reporting on China.
In an executive order signed Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump called for the organization, along with six others, to be reduced to “the minimum presence and function required by law.” That had immediate consequences for two of the media outlets the agency funds, Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Asia (RFA), both of which have a decades-long track record of covering Beijing’s actions at home and abroad.
VOA, which was established in 1942 as a broadcast service to counter Nazi propaganda during World War II, saw its staff locked out of the organization’s headquarters on Saturday. In a LinkedIn post over the weekend, VOA director Michael Abramowitz wrote that he and nearly all 1,300 journalists and staff members were immediately placed on administrative leave. As of Sunday, 550 journalists on contract with VOA received termination notices, according to Steve Herman, the outlet’s chief national correspondent. One impacted journalist confirmed to Foreign Policy that they had been fired as of Sunday.
The broadcaster’s stations around the world were forced to play music or go silent in place of normal programming, the New York Times reported.
RFA, founded in 1996 in the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre in China, faced a similar fate over the weekend. The organization received a letter Saturday morning signed by Kari Lake, Trump’s special advisor to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, stating that its grant had been terminated. Rohit Mahajan, RFA’s chief communications officer, told Foreign Policy that the organization would have to furlough U.S.-based workers by Friday and end overseas operations within a month if the decision isn’t reversed.
The two organizations have different mandates, but each has dozens of reporters covering China. VOA’s focus is to explain the United States and U.S. policy, including on China, to the rest of the world.
RFA, for its part, is designed to serve in place of local media in areas where press freedom has been restricted by authoritarian governments. Along with English and five other Asian languages, the outlet publishes in four languages spoken in China—Mandarin, Cantonese, Tibetan, and Uyghur—and aims to reach those local audiences. The site and broadcast have been censored in China since RFA’s founding. Representative surveys on who is getting around the Great Firewall to access the outlet’s content are impossible to conduct in China, but RFA said 13.5 percent of respondents in the country used the services weekly, according to a survey conducted this year using a method known as random intercept data.
The two media organizations have also aimed to inform readers and listeners around the world. Because both outlets are staffed in part by reporters who fled their home countries due to persecution, they often have unique access to marginalized communities and have broken major stories as a result. “RFA, for some time, has been one of the few outlets that have been able to essentially smuggle information out of areas like Tibet and Xinjiang,” said Maya Wang, associate China director at Human Rights Watch.
In 2017, RFA was one of the first outlets to report on the Chinese government’s mass internment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang. That finding served as a catalyst for other investigations by international outlets and rights organizations. Together, these reports led the U.S. government to label Beijing’s actions a genocide at the end of Trump’s first term.
Uyghur advocates have expressed concern about diminished coverage of the ongoing repression in Xinjiang without these government-funded outlets. “The defunding of Radio Free Asia is devastating for Uyghurs. RFA Uyghur is the world’s only uncensored Uyghur-language source for news about our homeland. Now, during the ongoing genocide, that voice is being silenced. This is exactly what the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] wants,” Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, wrote on X.
Chinese state media organizations have indeed responded to the suspensions with schadenfreude. An editorial in the Global Times on Monday wrote, “The so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.” The organizations have long been in Beijing’s crosshairs. RFA shut down its Hong Kong office last year in the wake of new laws curtailing press freedom there.
Before the Washington offices go the way of Hong Kong’s, both organizations are considering ways to overturn the suspensions. “We believe the termination is contrary to law, and we’re weighing all options, including filing a challenge to the notice in federal court,” Mahajan said.
One immediate concern is the safety of persecuted foreign journalists who have been working for the organizations in the United States. “Chinese investigative journalists were essentially disappeared during the last 10 years [in China],” Wang said. These U.S.-funded outlets “are kind of like a small refuge for some of the exiled journalists” who work there or provide information to them. Mahajan said that RFA is working to protect foreign reporters amid the funding cuts.
With the Trump administration embracing autocrats around the world, the organizations will be fighting an uphill battle to stay open. In February, Elon Musk, the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, wrote that the organizations are irrelevant: “Nobody listens to them anymore.” After the executive order went out on Friday, the White House published an article describing VOA as “The Voice of Radical America” and listing its instances of alleged liberal bias. Lake, who initially supported transforming VOA into a weapon for “information war,” shifted to criticizing the organization, writing in an X post about its parent agency on Monday: “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.”
In his LinkedIn post, Abramowitz acknowledged that VOA could use change, but not of the wholesale variety. “VOA needs thoughtful reform, and we have made progress in that regard. But today’s action will leave Voice of America unable to carry out its vital mission. That mission is especially critical today, when America’s adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States,” he wrote.
If VOA and RFA aren’t able to make their case to the administration, it will leave Trump’s team—which is tasked with countering China—with less visibility into the country and its human rights record.
“RFA has really played an important role in keeping the world informed about what’s happening in [Xinjiang and Tibet] and much of an increasingly repressive Asia-Pacific region. Without it, I’m afraid that these kind of areas, which are already becoming information blackholes, are going to completely close off to the rest of the world,” Wang said.
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