She wanted to be governor of Arizona. She wanted to be a senator from Arizona. She wanted to run Voice of America, to be MAGA’s broadcaster to the world. Then she wanted to shut down Voice of America, after Donald Trump and Elon Musk turned against it. She wanted to play a big role in the MAGA movement, to live up to the phrase she’s used to describe herself: “Trump in heels.” But Kari Lake has achieved none of those things.
Instead, during her 11 months as the de facto leader of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Lake has done profound damage to America’s foreign broadcasters, and to America’s ability to communicate with the world. USAGM runs Voice of America and gives grants to, among others, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Open Technology Fund, which helps people access information in places including Russia and Iran. During her tenure, Lake has ceded influence to Chinese and Russian state media all over the world, as their broadcasters have taken over slots from canceled U.S. programs. She has hampered the U.S. government’s ability to inform foreign audiences in times of crisis. She blocked RFE/RL from using USAGM’s transmission equipment, which meant that during mass street protests and an internet blackout in Iran recently, the broadcasters’ Persian-language service, Radio Farda, had to rent from commercial contractors. Voice of America’s Spanish-language service, which once reached tens of millions of people in Latin America, was unavailable during the U.S. military’s intervention in Venezuela because it had been shut down months earlier.
[Anne Applebaum: The U.S. surrenders in the global information wars]
But even while Lake presided over the destruction of an agency vital to U.S. national-security interests and the squandering of taxpayer dollars—more on this later—she often seemed to be focused on other things. Throughout the past year, she has posted on X constantly, sometimes many times a day, about Arizona politics (“Arizona elections are theater. Everyone knows it”); Somali immigration; Ashli Babbitt; Melania Trump’s movie; even former Ohio Governor John Kasich, whom she called “a pussy.” Although head of an agency whose broadcasters are mandated by law to be nonpartisan and editorially independent, she has four photographs of President Trump at the top of her X feed, where she has also pinned a long, wild screed about unspecified electoral fraud (“Why is NO ONE talking about this during a week when a lot of people are TALKING??? I think I know—because there is BIG money in keeping the corrupt, rigged elections going”).
Yet if Lake’s intention is to win Trump’s favor by broadcasting conspiracy theories, she is failing at that too. In October, she was spotted waiting in a White House lobby, hoping to see Trump, according to two GOP operatives. “Kari has been here for hours,” a White House aide told one of the operatives that day. “She’s going to run, and she’s asking for the endorsement.” Lake, who was rumored to be mulling a run for Congress in Arizona, eventually shared her pitch with a low-level aide who conveyed no enthusiasm for a third Lake candidacy, the same person said. The other Republican operative offered a similar account. When asked for comment on the episode, Lake responded in a statement that “every shred of this question is incorrect” and added, “The President has always been very gracious and generous when I have requested time with him.”
Whatever she does next, Lake will leave behind immense damage, as well as a legal quagmire, not least because the legal basis for her current position is peculiar. Because Trump removed most members of the bipartisan, Senate-confirmed board that oversees USAGM, depriving it of a quorum, Lake could not formally be appointed head of VOA. The head of USAGM has to be confirmed by the Senate, but for whatever reason, Trump didn’t want to go through the process. That’s why Lake arrived at USAGM with the title “special adviser.” She was promoted to “deputy CEO”; later she began calling herself the “acting CEO.” During a sworn deposition in two lawsuits brought by fired employees, she admitted that she had no documentation confirming her appointment to the latter position.
Once in place, several current and former staffers told us, Lake made little effort to understand the agency, its mission, or even the point of journalistic independence. A television-news anchor in Phoenix for more than two decades, she had a very limited background in international journalism, and during congressional testimony revealed that she did not know, for example, what language is spoken in Armenia, although VOA had an Armenian service. During her deposition, she could not think of any countries in Asia, other than China, that might not have adequate sources of free information; apparently North Korea did not come to mind.
Although she had no experience working with any of the institutions before, she did not initially consult with senior officials at the broadcasters. Rohit Mahajan, the chief communications officer for RFA, said that leaders of all of the broadcasters had approached Lake, and continue to do so, but to little effect. Michael Abramowitz, the director of Voice of America, said he tried unsuccessfully to engage Lake both directly and through intermediaries. In the end he met her twice, once by accident in a hallway and once when he came to hand her a briefing book prepared by his staff. She took it and indicated she would read it, but he never heard back. (Lake declined to comment on these specific allegations due to ongoing litigation.)
But that was not unusual; she kept her distance from others as well, multiple current and former staffers said. One VOA staffer reckons that she wasn’t in that building “more than a couple of times” in a six-month period. In the deposition, Lake said she primarily spent time at the State Department, where she was eventually given an office. But she didn’t ask many people to meet her there either. In her statement, Lake defended her commitment to the job, saying, “Frankly, most of your ‘sources’ probably wish I didn’t work so hard.”
The VOA staffer also said that new appointees then working with Lake seemed “distrustful of federal employees, as part of the so-called deep state.” Among these appointees were John Zadrozny, an anti-immigration campaigner and DHS official in the first Trump administration; Mora Namdar, who contributed to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025; and Frank Wuco, a former talk-radio host known for promoting birtherism and several other conspiracy theories.
A former USAGM executive nevertheless said some employees were initially hopeful about Lake, given her television experience. Perhaps, some thought, the outlet could have found an on-air role for her, or even created her own show. Another former employee said they had prepared proposals for institutional reform. But whatever plans Lake had originally made for the broadcasters ended in mid-March, when Trump signed an executive order designed to close the entire agency. Lake admitted under oath that this decision caught her by surprise. Nevertheless, perhaps egged on by criticism from the Trump aide Ric Grenell and from Musk—who described the broadcasters, collectively reaching hundreds of millions of people, as “radical left crazy people talking to themselves”—Lake instantly rushed to demolish the institution, even denigrating VOA as “rotten to the core.”
With the help of DOGE, she immediately began trying to cut grants to RFA, RFE/RL, and other agencies, forcing them to make emergency cuts in staff and programming. USAGM also fired about 500 VOA contractors, many of whom were journalists with unique language skills and contacts in difficult parts of the world. Because they are what Abramowitz described as “the guts of the language services,” people with years of experience and deep knowledge of their countries, their departure meant that many VOA programs became impossible to produce. Eventually most were shut down.
In addition, about 800 full-time employees were placed on paid administrative leave. During the following months, Lake and her team repeatedly tried to fire the agency staff, including journalists, editors, and tech support. But because Lake’s authority to discharge employees was uncertain, and because she and her aides did not comply with strict rules about so-called reductions in force in the federal government, Lake’s team kept running into legal hurdles that they seem not to have anticipated.
Even as Russian and Chinese state media were replacing American news reporting, USAGM was obligated to pay salaries and benefits to hundreds of people placed on leave. A minority report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations estimates that from March 15 through July 18 alone, USAGM paid hundreds of people more than $69 million not to work, and that cost has continued to grow. As of August, more than 500 people were still on administrative leave, still receiving salaries and benefits, and still barred from performing their duties. In September, a judge blocked another attempt to fire them. Since then, the federal government has likely paid them about $50 million more—an estimate based on average salary levels at the agency—while still preventing them from doing their jobs. Lake’s statement did not refute these numbers but instead blamed an “activist judge” for obstructing her plans.
Lake has taken the position that she is required by law to maintain merely a statutory minimum service at VOA, something far smaller than the broadcasts previously produced in 49 languages. Lake initially preserved service in only four languages (Mandarin, Dari, Pashto, and Farsi) but later added a few more, including Korean and Kurdish. Yet even as she continues to pay hundreds of experienced journalists and federal workers to remain on administrative leave, sources at VOA and USAGM told us that she is hiring more and more contractors. This may be because, as she has testified, she truly believes USAGM and its broadcasters are “rotten to the core.”
[Toluse Olorunnipa: Kari Lake’s attempt to deport her own employees]
Regardless, she seems to be replacing some journalists with propagandists. By law, all of the broadcasters are supposed to be nonpartisan, with a firewall between the journalists and the U.S. administration. The State Department puts out the administration’s views; the broadcasters are meant to be reporters, a distinction particularly important in places that don’t have any other independent media. But some of VOA’s newer material doesn’t appear to meet that standard. One recent article, originally published in Chinese, echoed the false claims that Trump likes to make about his own record: “Trump combined his dealmaking ability with diplomacy based on the concept of ‘peace through strength’ to secure agreements halting and restraining eight global conflicts in 2025.” VOA’s Mandarin-language Instagram feed recently began posting heroic, Photoshopped images of Trump with misty American flags and helicopters in the background.
In practice, this is another kind of waste. Trump did not halt or restrain eight global conflicts, and obvious pro-Trump puffery isn’t going to have the same kind of influence among Mandarin-speaking audiences as, say, the extraordinary reporting once done by Radio Free Asia’s Uyghur-language service, which had to be shut down when funding to the broadcaster was cut and only recently reopened with a limited service. In 2017, RFA broke the story of the Chinese government’s mass arrests of Uyghur people in Xinjiang, part of a crackdown that has since forced some 1.8 million people into concentration camps. This story also had an impact on international perceptions of China in a way that fictional tales of Trump’s diplomacy will not.
Lake’s decisions about USAGM property have also taken their toll. Before Trump returned to office, the agency had begun to move into new quarters. Its old building, constructed in 1939 for the Social Security Board, needed expensive renovations; reportedly had ancient, faulty wiring; was far too big; and was generally unsuitable for modern journalism. After an extensive search and a lengthy negotiation, the service contracted to lease a smaller office building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Although the total price tag of the 15-year lease was more than $200 million, a number that looks large, the annual cost was reportedly lower than that of the agency’s former quarters. The owner gave USAGM two years’ free rent, as well as an additional nine months without rent to move into the building; the previous leaseholder threw in office furniture as well. According to USAGM’s previous CEO, the savings from the deal would have come to more than $150 million over the course of the lease. Renovations had begun, and some staff had already moved in.
In March, Lake abruptly canceled the lease. The former USAGM executive and another person with knowledge of the transaction say that she and her team did not follow the specified termination procedures. Lake’s team did not want to reimburse the owner’s costs, which the people close to the deal said initially came to about $16 million. The executive believes that this is because any payment undercut their argument that “it’s cheaper to get rid of these things than to keep them.” Theoretically, the building’s owner could add to the list of lawsuits against Lake, and a court could now hold USAGM, and thus U.S. taxpayers, liable for the entire 15-year lease. (In her statement, Lake maintained that canceling the lease reduced the agency’s costs and will save more than $225 million over 10 years.)
Meanwhile, office leases and other contracts around the world have been canceled, sometimes incurring additional costs, by VOA as well as the other broadcasters, staffers said. Further losses are mounting. USAGM also continues topay to update and maintain its transmission capabilities in multiple countries around the world, even though they are now being used less often, and even though Lake has prevented some of the services from using them. Lake is also engaged in a series of lawsuits, some of which she appears to have made only minimal effort to fight. RFE/RL has won several cases that have allowed it to remain open. Employees of VOA, RFA, and the Middle East Broadcasting Network have also received favorable court rulings. One federal judge, Royce Lamberth, a President Ronald Reagan appointee, has pointed out that when Congress appropriated $260 million to VOA for 2025, it did not intend the money to be used to cut programming and keep employees at home. “The legal term for that is ‘waste,’ he said, “and it is precisely what federal appropriation law aims to avoid.”
No one can say Lake lacks enthusiasm for the cause of shutting down the agency. During the course of the year, she has railed against USAGM, baselessly accused Voice of America of taking instruction from the Chinese Communist Party, and canceled visas for the foreign employees of the broadcasters, forcing them to leave the United States immediately and, in the case of some from repressive countries, scramble to find somewhere safe to live. “There was no caretaking to deal with that issue at all,” said Kathryn Neeper, director of strategy at USAGM, now on administrative leave. Lake did take time to make a slick video about the new VOA building whose lease she canceled, describing it as luxurious and overpriced.
More recently, after congressional appropriators began talking about bringing the agency’s funding back, she switched tack. She visited the Miami headquarters of Radio Martí—which is part of the Office of Cuban Broadcasting, beloved by Cuban American politicians, the broadcaster least affected by her purge—and even met staff last week at the main headquarters of RFE/RL in Prague.
She has lauded the work of the skeleton VOA services in Persian and installed a new leader for them—albeit a controversial, seemingly partisan one—even as she continued to prevent RFE/RL’s Radio Farda from accessing transmission services. Lake asserted in her statement that RFE/RL leaders “were putting out a message that was counter to US policy” and that she was helping them “align their messaging with American foreign policy and national security strategy.” But that assertion again reflects a deep misunderstanding of what RFE/RL is supposed to do. According to long-standing statute, the broadcaster has “professional independence,” providing not American messaging but real journalism in places where there are few alternatives.
Lake herself never pretends not to be partisan, keeping up a constant stream of praise and adulation for Trump, the “Trump Kennedy Center,” Charlie Kirk, and other MAGA heroes. But the Lake era at USAGM might look very different, even to Republicans, once the costs and losses of her year in charge are counted. Not only has she wasted money; she hasn’t won many arguments. In recent weeks, Congress rejected Lake’s requests to cut funding to a bare minimum and allotted USAGM something approaching previous levels of funding. Lake will retain the ability to undermine the broadcasters, but her expensive, monthslong, legally dubious attempt to destroy them has so far failed.
[Tom Nichols: They’re cheering for Trump in Moscow—again]
The uncertain future of her role might explain why Lake was said to be sitting in a White House waiting room in October, trying to get the president’s endorsement for a congressional race. But even if she had his blessing, a return to Arizona politics will be difficult. The Republican consultant and pollster Paul Bentz told us that MAGA voters in Arizona have moved on from Lake: “MAGA’s got other people that they’ve put at the forefront,” Bentz said. “They’ve got better candidates that they like more.” In October, a “war room” account on X affiliated with her past campaigns accused Fox News and Bret Baier of blacklisting her.
In her statement, Lake did not directly answer a question about whether she would seek a congressional seat, saying only, “If and when I decide to run for office, The Atlantic will be the very last to know.” Soon after allegedly being turned away at the White House, Lake also bought a condo in her native Iowa, according to MS Now, perhaps to try her luck in politics there. She can then explain to Iowa voters how much damage she did to American interests and communications around the world, as well as what happened to the hundreds of millions of dollars she squandered on their behalf.
The post What Is Kari Lake Trying to Achieve? appeared first on The Atlantic.
