Many Americans have never heard of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. But, every week, hundreds of millions around the world rely on the news outlets it oversees.
Now, that independent news coverage is under threat and could soon disappear entirely.
On March 15, the Trump administration began working to dismantle USAGM, which oversees editorially independent news outlets like Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.
About 1,300 VOA staffers were placed on administrative leave, meaning VOA went dark — and has since stayed silent — for the first time since World War II. The next day, about 500 contractors, including me, were notified that they were being terminated, effective March 31. That same weekend, USAGM terminated the federal grants that fund Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
The efforts to dismantle USAGM were brought about by an executive order from President Donald Trump, who has long had a contentious relationship with news outlets he accuses of bias, including VOA.
The move prompted outcry from press freedom groups and celebrations in Moscow and Beijing, where the outlets have long been thorns in the sides of autocrats. Experts have warned that Chinese and Russian disinformation is poised to fill the potential void, which they say could pose national security risks to the United States.
I’ve spent the past few years reporting for VOA on press freedom issues around the world. Now, the crisis is closer to home than ever.
What’s happening to VOA is a symptom of a broader attack on press freedom in the United States, media freedom experts said. But VOA’s status as an international broadcaster with a huge reach means its apparent dismantling is likely to also have sweeping consequences for media freedom and access to information around the world, they said.
Kari Lake — the former local broadcast journalist and unsuccessful politician, and current MAGA loyalist and USAGM senior adviser — said in announcing the sweeping changes earlier this month that USAGM is “unsalvageable” and that “waste, fraud, and abuse run rampant” in the agency.
The White House has referred to VOA as “radical propaganda,” but I know firsthand the lengths the news outlet goes to in order to ensure everything that is published is independent, fact-based and unbiased. VOA’s 1976 charter, which protects its editorial independence, has long been the guidepost.
A lawsuit filed Friday by six VOA staffers against Lake, acting USAGM CEO Victor Morales and the Trump administration alleges their moves to shut down the U.S.-funded network were unlawful and unconstitutional. The lawsuit points to regulations and law that protect VOA’s editorial independence and safeguard the agency from political meddling. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty is also suing over the termination of its grant.
Trump had long lambasted journalists as “the enemy of the people.” The Trump administration’s efforts to demolish USAGM are taking place in the context of what press freedom experts warn is a wider assault on media freedom in the United States.
“Trump is waging a multi-front war to silence all voices that don’t echo his own,” Kathy Kiely, chair of free press studies at the University of Missouri, told me. “He’s doing what he can to hamstring news outlets.”
USAGM was created by an act of Congress, so the president cannot unilaterally eliminate it, but the administration’s gutting of the agency has had the impact of hobbling the news outlets it oversees, including VOA.
In other cases, the government is targeting news outlets in different ways.
The list of examples runs long: Trump’s ongoing lawsuits against CBS News and The Des Moines Register; the White House’s ban on The Associated Press, which spiraled into a broader co-opting of the White House press pool; the Federal Communications Commission’s investigations into various news outlets; and rhetoric from administration officials that is often hostile toward journalists.
To Kiely, news outlets should view the efforts to dismantle USAGM as a warning for the broader industry.
“All of us in the news media have to act as though every attack on one of us is an attack on all of us,” she said. “The news media is a competitive arena, but we need to put that aside in order to defend the First Amendment.”
During my years at VOA, I was always proud to work at a news outlet whose motto was “A Free Press Matters” and whose work embodied that credo. As a press freedom reporter who has spent years documenting threats to media freedom and democracy around the world, I’m now witnessing those kinds of attacks taking place in my own country and experiencing them being perpetrated against my own outlet.
VOA’s global reach — its audience measures more than 350 million people per week across 49 languages — means its apparent dismantling will also have severe consequences for audiences around the world, according to press freedom experts. That’s not including VOA’s sister outlets, like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, which, respectively, reach 47 million and nearly 60 million people each week.
Originally established in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda, VOA’s mission has long been to deliver independent, balanced news to the most censored populations in the world and model what a free press looks like to places where the government represses the media.
But what happens to those populations when they lose access to that news source? And what happens when that free press model no longer exists? These are questions that have rights experts worried, and their answers bode poorly for VOA’s audience.
“I’m very concerned about the short-term consequences, let alone the long-term consequences,” Gulnoza Said told me.
Said is the Europe and Central Asia program coordinator at the Committee to Protect Journalists in New York. She previously worked at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty at its headquarters in Prague and consulted for VOA’s Uzbek Service in New York.
VOA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty for decades have delivered news to audiences around Eastern Europe and Central Asia where local media cannot report freely — and that access to independent information is what’s at stake, according to Said.
Russian authorities have for years viewed VOA and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as a threat to their attempts to control the narrative, according to Said, but the outlets still managed to deliver the news. In 1986, VOA broke the news about the deadly explosion in the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine to audiences in what was then the Soviet Union.
“Unfortunately, with authoritarianism being on the rise throughout Eurasia, that work is even more important than ever,” Said told me. “That’s why the decision to close the operations of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe or suspend their operations goes against press freedom.”
The implications are just as urgent in other parts of the world, including Asia, according to local journalists and rights experts.
Access to reliable information can be a matter of life and death in Myanmar, which has been gripped by a violent civil war since the military overthrew the civilian-led government in a 2021 coup.
The dismantling of VOA and Radio Free Asia will likely have the biggest impact on people in villages and conflict zones around Myanmar, where electricity is unreliable or the military has cut off internet access, according to journalist Myint Kyaw.
“Access to news and information about armed conflicts is crucial for their daily lives and survival,” said Myint Kyaw, who left Myanmar after the coup and now lives in Thailand.
Meanwhile, for decades, VOA, and later Radio Free Asia, which was established in 1996, have functioned as “a window to a world that was otherwise pretty unreachable” for audiences in China, where the government tightly controls the media, according to Sophie Richardson, co-executive director of the nonprofit Chinese Human Rights Defenders.
The flow of information goes both ways. Without VOA and Radio Free Asia, it will be more challenging not only to get independent news to audiences inside China but also to get news from inside China to the rest of the world, according to Richardson, who is based in Washington. Radio Free Asia, for instance, was the first news outlet in the world to report on the mass detention of Uyghurs in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.
Richardson said she worries about how being cut off from a primary source of independent news will affect populations in the long term.
“If this persists over time and people are systematically starved of access to credible news and reliable, free media outlets, I don’t know what happens to peoples’ perceptions of information,” she said.
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