The Trump administration suspended all news broadcasts from Voice of America and furloughed all its journalists on Wednesday after the government shut down, effectively fulfilling its efforts to shutter the agency two days after a judge ordered it to reinstate workers and restore programming.
Nearly all the 80 or so remaining employees at the agency, which broadcast news to countries with limited press freedom, are furloughed. Mass furloughs and the suspension of news programming did not occur during past shutdowns, as providing news coverage to authoritarian countries like Russia, China and Iran was considered essential to national security.
“Voice of America broadcasts have been suspended due to a funding cut from the United States government, which has led to a government shutdown,” reads a recent notice posted on the website for the news network’s Persian-language service. Similar notices appeared on the network’s websites for other language services, including Mandarin, Dari and Pashto.
But a shutdown preparation document published last year by the news group’s oversight agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, listed about 650 Voice of America employees and journalists as essential to “perform activities expressly authorized by law.”
A similar document published last month, however, does not designate Voice of America as essential, although it mentions the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, another federal agency that provides news coverage to Cubans in Spanish, as “foreign relations activities essential to the national security.”
Kari Lake, a fierce Trump ally and the acting chief executive at the oversight agency, said her agency was “following all applicable law and related guidance” from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.
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