Donald Trump wants Voice of America to shut up—and he doesn’t care about the damage it will cause.
On Friday, the Trump administration delivered mass termination notices to more than 600 employees at VOA and it’s oversight organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, effectively gutting the federally funded news outlet that has spent over eight decades providing independent reporting to nations with restricted press freedom.
The agency frames the 1,400 job cuts since March as a “reduction in force” that has shrunk the staff at VOA and USAGM by a mind-boggling 85%. The displaced employees have been put on paid leave and are slated to be officially dismissed in September.
Some of those affected had just returned from administrative leave, including reporters from VOA’s Persian-language service, who were briefly reinstated following Israel’s attack on Iran, according to Politico.
But Friday’s mass firings were hardly surprising.
In March, Trump criticized VOA as “the voice of radical America,” accusing the network of promoting “anti-American” and partisan “propaganda.” He signed an executive order to dismantle the agency, halting its news operations for the first time since its founding in 1942.
Kari Lake, a MAGA hardliner and Trump’s pick to run USAGM, announced a deal in May to air content from right-wing network One America News on VOA. The message was clear: The administration wasn’t just cutting jobs—it was destroying the institution and reshaping it in the far right’s image.
The same month, the administration also terminated nearly 600 VOA contractors, in direct defiance of a court order issued in March that paused the dismantling.
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Lake, a former TV anchor and twice-failed GOP candidate in Arizona, made her intentions official this month when she informed Congress of her plan to eliminate nearly every position under her watch. Lake claimed she only needed to maintain 20 VOA staffers to comply with legal obligations.
In a statement Friday, Lake said 250 employees will remain across USAGM, VOA, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.
She framed the catastrophic layoffs as “decisive action” to rein in “out-of-control federal bureaucracy” and “put American taxpayers first.” Critics argue the real goal, however, is to silence one of the government’s few global counterweights to authoritarian disinformation.
Kari Lake being interviewed after a Nov. 2023 Trump campaign rally in Hialeah, Fla.
“This spells the death of 83 years of independent journalism that upholds U.S. ideals of democracy and freedom around the world,” said Patsy Widakuswara, VOA’s former White House bureau chief and lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against Lake and USAGM, to The New York Times.
Employees said the layoffs were as cruel as they were sweeping. One journalist reported that some staff discovered they had lost their jobs after stepping outside for a morning break, only to find their badges were deactivated and they were locked out of the building when they returned.
To make matters worse, some employees too young for mandatory retirement are reportedly being terminated without severance in an apparent violation of agency policy.
In a joint statement, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit urged Congress to take action.
“Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and extremist groups are flooding the global information space with anti-American propaganda,” they wrote. “Do not cede this ground by silencing America’s voice.”
Thanks to Trump, Voice of America—founded during World War II to counter Nazi disinformation—is now positioned to fall silent. Its mission and much of its staff wiped out by a callous and clueless American president.
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