Kari Lake, a staunch Trump ally leading Voice of America, is under federal investigation after MAGA allies accused her of misusing the organization’s funds to sideline employees.
The Government Accountability Office is looking into the U.S. Agency for Global Media — Voice of America’s parent agency — for potentially misusing congressionally appropriated funds, an agency spokesperson confirmed to The Daily Beast on Thursday.
The probe comes at the request of a Republican-majority panel chaired by MAGA loyalist Sen. Lindsey Graham.
Graham’s betrayal, via the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations, came after Lake’s own staffers warned her in June that she may be violating federal law by putting hundreds of staffers on paid leave, the Washington Post reported.
Senior GOP and Democratic staffers told Lake that her use of appropriated funds to fire VOA staffers went against the Anti-Deficiency Act—a federal law prohibiting executive overreach on spending without explicit congressional authorization.
“You have not followed legal requirements,” one fed-up GOP staffer wrote bluntly in an email to Lake.
Her mass layoffs came after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in May that disbanded the agency, calling it the “Voice of Radical America” and declaring that “taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to USAGM for comment.
This is just the latest drama for the former Fox TV anchor, who is also embroiled in litigation after a Reagan-appointed judge deemed her mass layoffs at VOA “potentially unlawful.”
“[W]hen Congress appropriated $260 million to VOA for [fiscal year] 2025, it did not anticipate that such a significant sum of taxpayer funds would be used to pay employees to sit at home for months on end,” wrote U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth. “The legal term for that is ‘waste,’ and it is precisely what federal appropriation law aims to avoid.”
Lake insisted that she has no intention of acting without Congress and is simply carrying out Trump’s wishes to shutter USAGM “within the bounds of current and future federal law,” she wrote in a declaration filed in federal court Wednesday.
Since taking over the agency, Lake has put over 85 percent of VOA employees, meaning around 1,400 staffers, on leave and slashed global programming that, since World War II, had delivered news to countries under autocratic regimes.
In a statement to the Post, Lake rebuked all accusations of wrongdoing: “The Government Accountability Office (GAO) and Democrats are angry that President Trump is rightsizing the bloated federal government, so they are teaming up to try to stop him,” she began.
“U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) is an American-taxpayer-funded agency that is highly corrupt and wastes hundreds-of-millions of dollars broadcasting 90s-style news around the globe — often spreading an anti-American message. The President’s March 14 Executive Order calls for reducing USAGM to what is statutorily required by law — nothing more; that is my mission at USAGM.”
And the worthless WaPo is currently working on another one.The deep state mouthpieces are in a panic.😂It’s a good time to be alive. https://t.co/6hhfhwEwty pic.twitter.com/YU26BhbXba
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) August 13, 2025
A group of VOA journalists sued Lake, but she’s been busy pushing to deport the international reporters she ousted—unfazed by the fact that some could face persecution or prison back home for working for the U.S. government.
In an interview on the far-right network Real America’s Voice, Lake made her stance chillingly clear:“ Their time here is up. And I said before, if I have to go to the airport with them, and accompany them to the airport and get them on the flight, I will do that.”
The post MAGA Turns on Kari Lake as Feds Launch Investigation appeared first on The Daily Beast.
