During his first term, Donald Trump accused Voice of America of speaking “for America’s adversaries — not its citizens.” Over the weekend, he essentially dismantled it.

Late Friday, Trump issued an executive order that directed VOA and an array of federal offices to “be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” About 1,000 journalists were placed on indefinite leave. Those who showed up to work to broadcast their programs were locked out of the building.

It wasn’t exactly what Kari Lake was planning. The onetime candidate for Arizona governor and U.S. Senate whom Trump tapped to lead VOA had, like other MAGA loyalists, eagerly sought a role in the new administration. An ardent booster of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, Lake had also echoed Trump’s criticism of national media outlets and of the content at VOA. If confirmed to lead the organization, she had said, she would be able to transform the outlet into a powerful “weapon” to fight an “information war.”

But the rapid pace of events in recent days shows that Trump’s campaign to dismantle the federal bureaucracy and control U.S.-backed news content across the globe has effectively gutted VOA, potentially forcing it to go dark for the first time since World War II. It also reveals the uncertainty facing the people Trump installed to lead federal agencies — and the tension between their ambitions to be relevant and his own desire cut those agencies out of existence.

Voice of America delivers news coverage to countries around the world where a free press is threatened or nonexistent. At its start, VOA told stories about democracy to people in Nazi Germany. VOA and affiliates such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia are designed as a form of soft diplomacy, a way to tout the United States’s free-press values in countries where antidemocratic forces prevail.

Trump and his allies have attacked the federally run news outlet in the same way they have criticized mainstream media generally, accusing its journalists of publishing unfair and inaccurate reports. The outlet has also devoted significant attention to covering antidemocratic regimes, such as those in Russia and Hungary, that Trump regularly admires. It is another chilling sign of Trump’s desire to upend the U.S.’s relationship with the world, press freedom advocates say — and to eliminate the flow of information he doesn’t like. In this case, the impact is huge: VOA and its affiliates reach 420 million people in 63 languages and more than 100 countries each week.

Trump’s directive targeted the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, and severed contracts for privately incorporated international broadcasters the agency also oversees, including Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks. All told, roughly 3,500 journalists and other media workers were affected by the moves.

Lake signed those termination notifications, according to four people familiar with the actions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

“People in America don’t know a lot about USAGM and our networks because by law we can’t broadcast in the U.S.,” said Grant Turner, a former chief financial officer of the agency, who retired in January. “But our newsrooms are full of media stars with strong trust among overseas audiences who have little access to factual information. Kari Lake and the administration are just setting that all on fire.”

The head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Steve Capus, called the cancellations of the contracts “a massive gift to America’s enemies.”

A representative from VOA and the Agency for Global Media did not respond directly to a list of questions for this story. Instead, the representative responded with a message from Lake attacking The Washington Post.

Lake had quickly zeroed in on VOA as a next act after losing her 2024 bid for the Senate to Democrat Ruben Gallego. She was in touch with Trump, who had endorsed her campaign. At the time, Lake was being mentioned as a possible contender for ambassador to Mexico or as an agency spokesperson. Instead, the longtime local news anchor wanted a position that would put her decades of news experience to use.

“Kari really, really wanted VOA,” the person close to Lake recalled. “Shaping that voice to be more in line with President Trump’s vision and America First messaging.”

When Trump announced her as director of the organization on Dec. 11, he said she would “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.” But he and his allies have also been signaling their more dramatic intentions for weeks.

“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 government-cutting adviser Elon Musk agreed, writing on his social media platform: “Yes, shut them down … Nobody listens to them anymore.”

Initially, Lake pushed back. “I believe it is worth trying to save,” she told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in late February, just before she was named special adviser to the USAGM. Trump plans to install her as VOA director later this year. Lake said VOA “won’t become Trump TV. ” But, she added: “It sure as hell will not be T.D.S. TV,” referring to what she called “Trump derangement syndrome.”

Lake has spoken about the need for changes at VOA, according to an Arizona associate who had recently talked to her. But those changes sound more like operational shifts than wholesale revamping or downsizing. During one phone call, Lake said the outlet had not adapted with the times and needs to produce more digital-friendly content to expand its audience. She also spoke of a need to examine audience numbers, bureaus and content. Lake was pondering how to “rebuild audiences that have fallen off” and “shift resources,” the person recalled of the call.

Lake also said she wanted to leverage content the government already has, including footage created by NASA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and archival records at the Library of Congress, the person said.

As the scale of DOGE’s ambitions have become more clear, however, Lake appears to have pivoted, and it is unclear whether her initial ideas will ever come to fruition.

More recently, her allies have claimed that there is no daylight between the Arizona Republican and Musk’s U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, which is leading the charge to reduce the federal bureaucracy on a massive scale. Lake came to the job with the mindset that she “would welcome the DOGE team to analyze” VOA operations and would support “whatever the Trump administration wanted to do,” a person close to Lake told The Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to speak candidly.

She arrived at the Agency for Global Media with several DOGE staffers at her side. She has circulated with Mora Namdar, who wrote a chapter in Project 2025 about Voice of America and its parent entity. Namdar pilloried the agency for “joining the mainstream media’s anti-U.S. chorus and denigrating the American story — all in the name of so-called journalistic independence.” She named veteran reporter Steve Herman as an example of a VOA reporter who was “personally insulting” to Trump during his first administration.

Herman was placed on paid “excused absence” while his bosses started a review of his social media posts to determine whether they were biased against the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the investigation. Herman confirmed his status to The Washington Post but declined to comment further.

The day before the executive order, Lake announced plans to cancel the news agency’s “expensive and unnecessary newswire contracts,” including with the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse. She said the decision would save $53 million.

She also told her social media audience that she was shocked about another expense: the price of what she described as a swanky Biden-era building lease. She called the lease “a colossal waste of money.” She has encouraged Trump allies to help her find fault with the outlets she oversees.

The message was “just full of lies and misrepresentations about the new headquarters building,” Turner said, “saying it was a bad deal when in fact, it saves the government over $150 million” over 15 years.

The existing USAGM building experienced frequent leaks, had bad HVAC and needed regular repairs to its systems, said Turner and a half-dozen staffers who backed his account and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The existing building is about 700,000 square feet, and the new building, at 300,000 square feet, constructed in the mid-2000s’s, shrinks the agency’s real estate footprint by more than half.

On Saturday, Lake underscored her support for Trump’s gutting of VOA and its parent, USAGM. She ticked off the “most egregious findings” she said she’d already found at the agency, including “massive national security violations” and “eye-popping self dealing,” though she did not mention a specific example of either. Musk appears to approve of her rhetoric, retweeting her video Sunday.

Trump’s disdain for VOA made international news last week in a testy exchange with a VOA journalist in the Oval Office.

Patsy Widakuswara asked visiting Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin whether he and Trump would discuss “the president’s plans to expel Palestinian families” from Gaza.

“Nobody’s expelling any Palestinians,” Trump interrupted, then asked Widakuswara: “Who are you with?”

“Voice of America,” she answered.

“Go figure,” Trump scoffed.

Widakuswara never published a story about the exchange. Though she had written a preview of the meeting the week before, no story from her appeared on the Voice of America website the evening of the meeting. Instead, VOA published a dispatch from Reuters.

Widakuswara confirmed that she was among the journalists placed on administrative leave Saturday.

To take on the director role at VOA, Lake must wait for Trump’s pick to lead USAGM — the conservative media critic Brent Bozell III — to be confirmed by the Senate. Then, a bipartisan board overseeing the network must approve Lake’s position.

One complication: After Trump took office, the White House fired all members of the bipartisan board. Any replacements must also be confirmed by the Senate, leaving the timing of Lake’s appointment uncertain.