Every day, some 2 billion people around the world use privacy-protection tools supported by the Open Technology Fund. When people in China escape their government’s firewalls and censorship software—now so dense that the system has been called the “locknet”—or when users in Cuba or Myanmar evade cruder internet blocks, they can access material written in their own languages and read stories they would otherwise never see. Both the access and some of the information are available because the U.S. government has for decades backed a constellation of programs—the technology fund, independent foreign-language broadcasters, counterpropaganda campaigns—designed to give people in repressive countries access to evidence-based news.
The information that people in the autocratic world receive from this network is wide ranging, based on reporting, and very different from what they are told by state media in their own country. If they live in Iran, for example, they might have learned from Radio Farda (backed by U.S. funding, broadcast in Persian) that their government did not, as it had claimed, capture an Israeli pilot during June’s bombing campaign, and they might even have heard, in their own language, American explanations of the campaign instead. If they live in Siberia, they could hear from Radio Liberty (U.S.-backed, staffed by Russian-speaking journalists) precise information about the poor condition of their local roads, including one highway that is 89 miles long but so muddy and full of potholes that traversing it takes 36 hours. If they are Uyghurs living in China, they could have heard, at least before the end of May, reporting in Uyghur from Radio Free Asia (also U.S.-backed, producing reports in nine languages), the broadcaster that originally informed the world about internment camps for members of the persecuted minority.
But for how much longer will this information flow? Right now, all of America’s foreign broadcasters, which also include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and a handful of others, are in grave danger. At the end of February, President Donald Trump appointed Kari Lake as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees them. Lake is an ideologue and former local-TV anchor who failed to be elected governor of Arizona, and then failed to be elected as a senator from Arizona. With no experience in international broadcasting or foreign policy, she put the entire staff of VOA on administrative leave and announced plans to cut the funding of all of the organizations under the USAGM umbrella; she did so with venomous relish, hypocritically accusing chronically underfunded broadcasters of wastefulness, tarring journalists as foreign agents. She began firing contract employees, in some cases giving visa holders who had worked for years on behalf of the U.S. government 30 days to leave the country.
All of the organizations contend that Lake’s actions are illegal, and all of them are now engaged in extensive lawsuits, even as they are already cutting budgets, programs, and journalists. They have won some initial cases. In March, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the administration to keep Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty open, “in keeping with Congress’s longstanding determination” that “the continued operation of RFE/RL is in the public interest.” Last month, the same judge, a Ronald Reagan appointee, found that Lake did not actually have the right to fire Michael Abramowitz, the director of Voice of America. That power belongs to a bipartisan, Senate-confirmed board—whose members Trump removed in January. Congress, not Lake, also has the legal right to decide whether or not to fund the broadcasters and can decide to do so, overriding the president and his Office of Management and Budget, which pushed hard to eliminate the outlets. Indeed, the House Appropriations Committee has already put funding for foreign broadcasting in next year’s budget—although of course the administration is challenging Congress’s power of the purse as well.
Even if they remain open, all of the foreign broadcasters will remain in peril under an administration that is bent on destroying them, and they know it. When reporting this article, I interviewed multiple people who asked not to be quoted: Nobody wants to say or do anything that will make the situation worse. These are mission-driven people who have gone to work every day in the belief that they are promoting America, as well as a set of American ideals—free speech, the rule of law, democracy.
They have long had bipartisan support. Since the creation of Radio Free Europe in 1950, Democrats, Republicans, senators, representatives, and every president from Harry Truman to Joe Biden all believed in the importance of helping people in closed societies gain access to evidence-based information, and not just for their own sake. Better-informed Russians or Iranians would be less likely to go to war with us, less likely to invade other countries, more likely to resist the whims of their dictators. Even Donald Trump in his first term as president—despite the best efforts of some of his appointees—continued to support independent foreign media, anti-censorship technology, and assistance for activists who fight censorship all over the world.
But that era is over. Without openly saying so, the United States is reorienting its foreign policy to protect governments that manipulate and censor information, both inside their own countries and around the world. Our own national security could suffer.
“Promoting censorship” is not how the administration describes its foreign policy, of course. In a speech in Riyadh earlier this year, Trump promised Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern monarchies that America would stop “giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs.” That made it sound like the administration would be somehow neutral.
But in a world of intense ideological competition, there is no such thing as neutrality. Since Trump’s election, China has not stopped spending billions of dollars broadcasting autocratic propaganda, buying space on television networks around the world, and training international journalists. Russia has not stopped using social media and deceptive websites to weaken and divide the U.S. and Europe, to prop up dictatorships in Africa, or to lie about the war in Ukraine.
Everywhere American voices disappear, other powers will fill the gap. An extensive Wall Street Journal investigation found that in Thailand, for example, a regular VOA slot on the Thai state broadcaster has already been replaced by a Chinese outlet. An Indonesian news channel that hosts a weekly program for the country’s Chinese diaspora no longer features reports in Mandarin from VOA after the cuts; it has replaced them with China’s state-run television too. The Journal found that China is rushing to expand media services in Africa, and cited in particular Ethiopia and Nigeria; a former USAGM employee told me that this was happening just as U.S. broadcasters were planning to expand in Ethiopia. RFA’s Cantonese-language service went off the air July 1, on the anniversary of the handover of Hong Kong from the U.K. to China.
The losses from cuts to RFE/RL inside Russia will be just as great. Already, cuts to the outlet forced Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit, to halt some of its work on corruption and organized crime, especially bad timing at a moment when this kind of information could help democratic governments track down companies that are evading sanctions. Programs exposing covert influence campaigns, counting war deaths, and producing material in minority languages aimed at Tatarstan, Bashkiria, and the North Caucasus have already been reduced or suspended. Russian state media will control the airwaves in all of those places instead.
In Iran, the impact could be even more acute. A few days after the Israeli and American bombing raids in Iran, I spoke with Saeid Golkar, a U.S.-based political scientist who follows Iranian social media. He told me Iranians were hearing from the regime that “we won this war; Israel has been defeated.” Those who don’t have access to alternative media were being bombarded with the same narrative: We are winning. At one point the Trump administration, belatedly realizing that it had a problem with messaging in Iran, scrambled to find recently sidelined Farsi-speaking VOA journalists and asked them to come back to work.
Americans have never supported foreign autocrats who hide information from citizens, nor did Trump’s electorate vote for censorship. On the contrary, Trump’s MAGA movement has repeatedly portrayed itself as the victim of censorship, sometimes conjuring up fake statistics or stories to prove it. (One famous example: that “22 million tweets” were suppressed by the Biden administration during the 2020 presidential campaign, which would have been shocking had it actually happened). Yet now that they are in place, MAGA policies amount to unilateral disarmament in the ongoing narrative war between the autocratic and democratic worlds..
Consider the fate of the Global Engagement Center, a small State Department office, also the product of a bipartisan effort and initially designed, well before the 2016 election, as a response to online terrorist and extremist campaigns. For the past several years, the GEC dedicated itself to identifying and revealing covert Russian and Chinese propaganda, most recently in Africa and Latin America. The GEC never played any role inside the United States and never aspired to do so. Nevertheless, the organization became the focus of a series of far-right conspiracy theories, amplified on X, which dishonestly described the GEC as an institution promoting “censorship.”
Late last year, congressional Republicans refused to renew its funding. When announcing the organization’s final closure, the State Department declared that the GEC “spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans”—a statement that not only provided no evidence but also represented an extraordinary example of the department smearing its own employees. On Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast, Darren Beattie, the acting under secretary of state for public diplomacy and the person who shaped this policy, boasted about how he had killed off the GEC, a “censorship operation within the State Department.”
In truth, the only real beneficiaries of the GEC’s closure were the foreign dictators conducting covert propaganda campaigns. In the weeks before the organization ceased operations, employees were preparing an exposure of a Chinese information operation in Europe and other regions. Three people familiar with this plan, who requested anonymity to avoid jeopardizing current and former colleagues at the State Department, told me that it was presented to Beattie, who stopped work on the exposure. “Far from spiking a single plan, we were proud to spike the entire GEC,” Beattie said in a statement today. “Indeed, not only was GEC’s infamous censorship activity profoundly misaligned with this Administration’s pro-free speech position, it was woefully and embarrassingly ineffective on its own terms. We prefer to advance our public diplomacy objectives by telling the truth to our adversaries, rather than censor our own citizens.” Beattie did not explain how exposing Chinese propaganda campaigns would restrict Americans’ freedom of expression.
Further consequences continue to reverberate. On August 29, the State Department leadership also gave official notice to staff that it was terminating more than two dozen agreements that the GEC had reached with countries around the world. These agreements had been designed to create common language and tactics to push back against Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and terrorist influence campaigns overseas. In the cable sent to staff, the State Department insisted that the agreements “infringed upon free speech enshrined in the U.S. Constitution” and stated that “the best way to counter disinformation is free speech.” But this is a strange argument to use in this context, given that the GEC was literally a vehicle for free speech: Its main function in the past several years was to publicly identify manipulation and promote transparency. Also, as one former State senior official pointed out to me, the department’s arguments make no sense, given that the administration is seeking to dismantle America’s foreign broadcasters. If we want more free speech, why are we suppressing our own voice?
Even more mysterious, in this sense, are the assaults on the National Endowment for Democracy and its sister organizations, which include the International Republican Institute, affiliated with the Republican Party, and the National Democratic Institute, affiliated with the Democrats. These organizations were not, before November, of special concern to Trump. All of them were founded in 1983, inspired by Ronald Reagan’s call for new institutions to “foster the infrastructure of democracy—the system of a free press, unions, political parties, universities—which allows people to choose their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences through peaceful means.”
Until now they have also played important roles in countering authoritarian propaganda and fighting censorship around the world. NED makes small grants to groups that monitor elections, promote free speech, fight kleptocracy, and counter authoritarian propaganda. For example, NED once funded the Asia Fact Check Lab, which exposes and explains Chinese information operations. The IRI has among other things polled more than 1.5 million people in more than 100 countries in recent decades, helping provide reliable information about the public’s views, often in places that don’t have many other sources. The NDI’s Open Government Partnership was one of many programs designed to fight corruption.
The endowment has so far successfully fought attempts to cut its funding in court, winning an unambiguous legal ruling, with which the administration complied, to preserve in full this year’s funding. NED also enjoys deep support across Congress, and has an organizational structure designed to protect it from political attack: It is run not by the U.S. government but by an independent, bipartisan board, which allows it to keep its distance from partisan politics. I was on that board from 2016 until 2024 and can attest that the conspiracy theories are wrong. The endowment’s board members are not secret intelligence officers but former civil servants, members of Congress, academics, and regional experts. Nobody pays them for the work they do, pro bono, on NED’s behalf.
The same kinds of unpaid boards run NDI and IRI, organizations that have historically worked with center-left and center-right political parties around the world and played special roles in connecting members of Congress with their foreign counterparts—in other words, spreading the American message around the world. Both have deep links to their respective parties; notably, the IRI board includes Senators Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham, Joni Ernst, Tom Cotton, and Dan Sullivan. And yet all of these organizations also became targets after a small number of accounts on X began attacking them. (One of the accounts belongs to Mike Benz, who also invented the “Biden censored 22 million tweets” mythology, so there is a certain logic to his role.) Among other things, the accounts falsely accuse the organizations of being CIA fronts—exactly the kind of lie that Russian propagandists tell.
None of these organizations, and certainly not the foreign broadcasters, has ever been offered a good-faith explanation for why they continue to be monitored, audited, and threatened with closure. “The only kind of communication we’ve gotten from USAGM, even at a staff level, is around terminations and reactivation of our grant agreement,” one agency insider told me on the condition of anonymity. “There’s no engagement on the work or the substance or the capabilities of the organization whatsoever.” Yet the work has never been more urgent. In the areas of censorship technology alone, cuts could begin to have immediate impact if not reversed. If funding for their virtual-private-network initiatives is not renewed, for example, the OTF will have to cut off access for tens of millions of users in China, Russia, Cuba, and Iran next November.
Chinese and Russian propagandists aren’t hiding how pleased they are by cuts to the organizations that challenge them and their narratives all over the world. Hu Xijin, the former editor of Global Times, a Chinese state-backed publication, wrote on social media that the “Chinese people are happy to see the U.S. anti-China ideological fortress breached from within.” Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of RT, the Russian state news station, echoed this view on a Russian talk show: “Today is a holiday for me and my colleagues at RT and Sputnik,” she said soon after cuts to RFE/RL and VOA were announced. The show’s host responded by gloating about fired Russian employees who “will now fight for the right to work as cleaners and floor cleaners.” The host continued, “By the way, I am addressing you, independent journalists: Die, you animals, because you are lying, vile, disgusting traitors to the Motherland. Die in a ditch.”
Lying, vile, disgusting traitors to the Motherland—the extremity of this language is a clue to why these organizations matter. Officials in Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and other dictatorships hate independent journalism and civic engagement for good reasons. Real information exposes crime and corruption. Active citizens inspire people to hope for something better. Inside Russia, they could help convince the public that the war in Ukraine is a shocking waste of human life. Inside Iran, they could inspire people to fight against a regime that’s destroying their economy and carrying out a paranoid search for political enemies. More than 800 executions have already taken place this year, a huge increase over last year’s pace.
From the American point of view, foreign broadcasters and organizations that fight foreign propaganda are a bargain. They cost very little in comparison with the billions we spend on defense. They have the potential to produce huge benefits. So why cut them?
In the absence of logical explanations, alternate theories abound. Some believe there is a plan to privatize VOA. Others think the explanation is simpler. Some MAGA acolytes, including Russell Vought of OMB, simply don’t believe that the U.S. should have any kind of soft power. Others like and admire Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime. In December 2021, for example, Darren Beattie posted on X that “Nato is a much greater threat to American liberty than Putin ever was.” Perhaps Beattie, Lake, and Benz simply share the same deep dislike of independent journalists such as Hu Xijin and Margarita Simonyan, and feel the same enthusiasm for destroying them.
The Trump administration has temporarily given this clique power. But even now, it is important to remember that they don’t represent the majority of Americans, nor do they represent a majority in Congress. In the coming months, the House and the Senate can, with a little effort and just the barest hint of bravery, resist this unilateral disarmament and put America back at the center of the fight against authoritarian propaganda. Instead of allowing the Chinese and Russians to gain ground, Congress can both restore funding and push back against the administration’s budgetary games, the rescissions that could restrict Congress’s ability to legislate about this, or anything else, in the future.
They can also back the people and the programs that legislators, including Republicans in both chambers, have long said they believe in. As Judge Lamberth wrote, when ruling on the case of RFE/RL, “Congress has found that ‘it is the policy of the United States to promote the right of freedom of opinion and expression’ and that ‘open communication of information and ideas among the peoples of the world contributes to international peace and stability.” Following its own logic, Congress can rededicate America to the real fight, against real censorship, once again.
*Illustration Sources: Jorg Greuel / Getty; CSA-Archive / Getty; Colors Hunter / Getty; Talaj / Getty.
The post America’s Unilateral Disarmament in the Censorship War appeared first on The Atlantic.
