Voice of America staff were locked out of their offices on Saturday—unable to complete planned reporting—after President Donald Trump signed an executive order gutting the government-run news agency that the White House has referred to as “radical propaganda.”
VOA was founded in 1942 in part to counter Nazi propaganda.
The move impacts all full-time staffers at the VOA and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting, which runs Radio and Television Martíore, and is poised to have a devastating effect on practically all operations under the United States Agency for Global Media—the parent entity of VOA and the department targeted by Trump’s Friday evening order.
According to the agency, which is fully funded by federal dollars, broadcasters and their sister networks reach 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week, “often in some of the world’s most restrictive media environments.”
“I am deeply saddened that for the first time in 83 years, the storied Voice of America is being silenced,” VOA director Michael Abramowitz wrote in a LinkedIn post. He shared that his entire staff of 1,300 journalists, producers, and assistants had been put on administrative leave, including himself. “Even if the agency survives in some form, the actions being taken today by the Administration will severely damage Voice of America’s ability to foster a world that is safe and free and in doing so is failing to protect U.S. interests,” he said.
A statement released by the White House following the executive order details news coverage by VOA as justification for the defunding, including an article defining white privilege after the murder of George Floyd, a story about whether Russia perpetuated allegations against Hunter Biden to benefit Trump, and a segment on LGBT migrants.
“It’s a relic of the past,” Ric Grenell, Trump’s special envoy for special missions, wrote on X in February. “We don’t need government-paid media outlets.” Trump’s billionaire donor and Department of Government Efficiency advisor Elon Musk wrote on his social media platform, also in February: “Yes, shut them down … Nobody listens to them anymore.”
The order, entitled “Continuing the Reduction Of The Federal Bureaucracy,” called for multiple other departments to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law,” including the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, and the Minority Business Development Agency.
In December, Trump announced that Republican Kari Lake, a former news anchor who ran twice for office in Arizona on a MAGA platform and lost both times, was his pick to serve as director of Voice of America—though that didn’t happen. A couple of months later, Trump named her a senior adviser to the USAGM.
On Saturday morning, Lake took to X, shared a link to the executive order, and told employees to check their emails—where they would find news of being terminated.
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