President Donald Trump’s plans to cut government spending and reduce funding to public media have ruffled feathers in Washington and triggered lawsuits from journalists whose jobs at Voice of America and other taxpayer-funded media agencies have been threatened.
The cutbacks affect the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) and agencies under its umbrella, including Voice of America (VOA); the Office of Cuba Broadcasting; and nonprofit organizations Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
The cuts to VOA are being challenged in court; the administration is seeking to cut 1,200 jobs and scale the outlet back to its statutory minimum.
The VOA has stated that its services are vital to protect U.S. interests and share the United States’ message of freedom and hope across the globe. But according to the Trump administration, the outlet has strayed from its original mission.
The White House cited an example, stating that VOA management told staff not to call the Hamas terrorist group and its members terrorists, “except when quoting statements.”
The administration also said VOA in May 2019 fired reporters over a live broadcast interview with a Chinese dissident that was cut short amid pressure from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In response to a request for comment regarding the allegations and criticisms leveled at VOA, David Seide, lead counsel for the VOA journalists who have sued the administration, said that reducing staffing and functions at VOA will benefit the United States’ adversaries.
“Over 80 years, Voice of America has built a reputation of trust for its audience of over 350 million worldwide,” Seide told The Epoch Times in a March 27 email. “Cancelling VOA kills that reputation. It produces an audience vacuum which will be filled by Iran, China, Venezuela, and North Korea.”
Trump appointed Kari Lake as senior adviser to USAGM. Lake is a former television news anchor who ran unsuccessfully for a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona in 2024 and for Arizona governor in 2020.
She is now at the center of a legal wrangle over the VOA cuts and has dismissed criticism from those who say that cutting back VOA will harm the United States and aid its adversaries.
According to Lake, VOA’s coverage has been more critical of the United States than of its adversaries. In many ways, she said, it has actually bolstered those adversaries.
Lake told The Epoch Times that as senior adviser, she has no authority over USAGM’s editorial content and is currently focused on “the rot” within the agency and on cutting “waste, fraud, and abuse.”
USAGM has not been completely shuttered but has been stripped down to its “statutory minimum,” she said.
“We’re in the process of figuring out exactly what that is, looking at the statutes and having a legal team decipher what it all means,” she told The Epoch Times.
According to her, the agency is going to “look a lot different.”
Beginnings and Lawsuit
Voice of America was launched in 1942 during World War II to counter Axis propaganda. During the war, VOA used shortwave radio to broadcast its message outside the United States, targeting nations where press freedom was suppressed.
The VOA Charter, signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1976, states that VOA news must be “accurate, objective, and comprehensive"; must “represent America, not any single segment of American society”; and must present “balanced and comprehensive” content to reflect significant U.S. thought and U.S. policies “clearly and effectively” with “responsible discussions and opinion.”
The media network says it serves the world as “a beacon of hope for underserved audiences who yearn for information about freedom of expression, civil society, and change.”
On March 21, a group of VOA journalists sued Lake as well as Victor Morales, whom she had appointed as USAGM’s acting CEO. The journalists alleged that the spending cuts at the federally funded network are unlawful and unconstitutional.
Reporters Without Borders and several labor unions are also listed as plaintiffs in the case.
On March 25, Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia granted a temporary restraining order preventing Lake and Morales from shutting down Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s operations. The judge stated that the federal government had failed to provide a satisfactory explanation for defunding the agency.
Concerns Over Censorship
A former VOA journalist, who spoke to The Epoch Times on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, said that “censorship and self-censorship” was occurring at the agency.The source could not say whether censorship at VOA was happening on a large scale or systemic level but alleged that VOA deliberately deleted or heavily edited views expressed by right-wing activists (including Trump supporters) and certain segments harshly criticizing the CCP. Liberal voices were left intact.
“This is not how journalism works,” the source said.
The source said VOA has historically served the world well by helping defeat Nazi and Soviet Union propaganda but has deviated from its mission to fairly represent U.S. policies, values, and culture.
VOA, the source said, has violated its own charter and shifted to echoing left-wing media narratives rather than trying to “win the hearts and minds” of people suffering under the oppression of authoritarian regimes.
In China, VOA sent its reporters to the scene of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. At the time, the Chinese people “gathered courage from VOA’s voice” and depended on its news reporting for the truth, the source said.
Many Chinese college students listened to VOA broadcasts to learn English and understand more about U.S. culture and Western civilization, the source said.
Over the decades, the VOA has turned on the United States by sometimes producing stories with anti-U.S., anti-Christian, and anti-Trump biases and by taking a sympathetic tone toward the CCP, the source said.
Now, under the guise of balance, VOA editors are allowing too much CCP propaganda into the content, according to the source.
“The meaning of ‘balance’ should be open to reexamination when the U.S. is confronting an atheist, genocidal regime with malicious intention to lie, to kill, and to overturn a rule-based world order from within,” the source said.
Although VOA has covered the CCP’s human rights abuses, including persecution against the Uyghurs and Falun Gong, VOA editors have avoided digging too deeply into issues deemed sensitive to the CCP, the source said.
“VOA wants to play the safe card,” the source said. “[It doesn’t] want to be accused of inciting division between Chinese people and the CCP regime.”
