- VOA Director Michael Abramowitz said he was among 1,300 employees placed on leave Saturday.
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump's administration on Saturday placed journalists at Voice of America and other U.S.-funded broadcasters on furlough, sharply chilling decades-old media outlets long considered critical to countering information offensives by Russia and China.
Hundreds of employees at Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe and other media outlets received an email over the weekend telling them they would be barred from their offices and should turn in their press passes and office-issued equipment.
Trump, who has already gutted the U.S. global aid agency and the Education Department, issued an executive order on Friday listing the U.S. Agency for Global Media among “elements of the federal bureaucracy that the President has determined to be unnecessary.”
Kari Lake, a vocal Trump supporter who was appointed to lead the media agency after she lost her U.S. Senate bid, wrote in an email to the media outlet that federal grants “no longer meet the agency’s priorities.”
The White House said the cuts would ensure “taxpayers no longer have to pay for radical propaganda,” marking a sharp change in tone toward networks designed to spread US influence abroad.
White House press secretary Harrison Fields wrote “goodbye” in X in 20 languages, mocking the media's multilingual coverage.
VOA Director Michael Abramowitz said he was among 1,300 employees placed on leave Saturday.
“VOA needs thoughtful reform, and we have made progress on that. But today's actions will prevent Voice of America from fulfilling its vital mission,” he wrote on Facebook, noting that its reach — in 48 languages — reaches 360 million people each week.
The head of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which began broadcasting to Soviet bloc countries during the Cold War, called the cutoff of funding “a huge gift to America's enemies.”
“The Iranian ayatollahs, the Chinese communist leaders and the autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the end of RFE/RL after 75 years of existence,” said the station's president, Stephen Capus.
Since the end of the Cold War, US-funded media have reoriented themselves, abandoning much of their programming focused on the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe and focusing on Russia and China.
Over the past decade, Chinese state media have dramatically expanded their presence, including by providing free services to media in developing countries that would otherwise pay Western news agencies.
Founded in 1996, Radio Free Asia's mission is to provide uncensored reporting from countries without free media, including China, Myanmar, North Korea and Vietnam.
The media operates an editorial barrier with a declared guarantee of independence, despite state funding.
The policy has angered some inside Trump, who has long been anti-media and believes that government-funded media should promote his policies.
The move to defund US media is likely to face challenges, as have Trump’s other sweeping cuts. Congress, not the president, has the constitutional power of the purse, and Radio Free Asia in particular has enjoyed bipartisan support in the past.
The human rights group Reporters Without Borders condemned the decision, saying it “threatens press freedom around the world and undoes America's 80-year history of supporting the free flow of information.”
Gregory Meeks, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and ranking Democratic congresswoman Lois Frankel said in a joint statement that Trump's actions “will cause long-term damage to U.S. efforts to counter propaganda around the world.”
One VOA employee, who asked to remain anonymous, described Saturday's announcement as another “perfect example of the chaos and lack of preparation of the process,” with VOA employees assuming that planned programs were offline but not saying so directly.
A Radio Free Asia staffer said: “It’s not just about loss of income. We have employees and contractors who fear for their safety. We have reporters working in obscure locations in authoritarian countries in Asia. We have staff in the US who fear deportation if their work visas are no longer valid.”
“To destroy us with one stroke of a pen is simply terrible.”
