340 - Silencing VOA Serves Putin Well: Trump's Latest Attack on Perceived Enemies

I was planning to respond positively today to readers' requests for "some good news" instead of all the gloom that my recent Substack columns have highlighted. But in view of late Friday night's (when else?) unheralded massacre of the Voice of America and similar stalwart information providers by Trump, better news will have to wait until next time. The self-inflicted damage to the United States and the gift the massacre gives to Putin and Xi Jinping, not to mention Kim Jong-un and Ayatollah Khamenei, is incalculable, And all because of a bruised presidential ego.

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Congress created the Voice of America and, in time, sister organizations to counter Nazi propaganda and to try to insert accurate and unbiased information behind enemy lines. Doing so might loosen German and Axis civilian support for Nazism and fascism, it was assumed.

The same kinds of presumptions prevailed after Hitler's defeat. The Cold War, with its massive disinformation activities emanating from Moscow and Russian-controlled cities such as Budapest and Bucharest, demonstrated the continued need for accurate information being broadcast by radio (and later television) to behind the lines of new enemies.

The Voice of America and its sister organizations: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Network, took on that massive task. Radio and Television Marti, directed at Cuba, was another. In 2025, the total budget for this freedom of information effort was only $270 million. The Voice alone had 1,300 employees and an audience of regular listeners (still behind enemy lines, often clandestine) of 420 million in more than 100 countries and 63 languages.

Now those 1,300 employees have been put on indefinite paid leave. Mike Abramowitz, the Voice's director, said that the order left VOA unable to carry out its "vital mission... especially critical today, when America's adversaries, like Iran, China, and Russia, are sinking billions of dollars into creating false narratives to discredit the United States".

The Voice is directly funded by Congress. The sister organizations, nominally private but non-profit, are supported by contracts that have now been cancelled, illegally. According to National Public Radio, the contract cancellations were signed by Kari Lake, a Trump-designated "advisor" to the US Agency for Global Media, not by its chief executive. Lake has no statutory authority to terminate anything or anyone. She was a twice-defeated Republican candidate for governor and the Senate in Arizona. Now she is lying about the building housing the Voice's operations, alleging expenses that do not exist.

Moreover, according to the New York Times, USAGM is Congressionally chartered as an independent agency. Congress passed a law in 2020 intended to limit the power of the agency’s presidentially appointed chief executive. Once again, Trump and his people have exceeded their powers.

It is no wonder why Putin has always railed against the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and Radio Liberty. China has often complained about the Voice and Radio Free Asia informing apt listeners inside China about discrimination against Muslim Uyghurs or about the nation's lockdown failures during the Covid-19 pandemic. Radio Free Asia exposed slave labor in North Korea and among its fishing fleets.

The Voice and its allied American broadcasting efforts are widely welcomed even today throughout a world that is more attuned to social media programming than to short-wave transmissions or even television. They all strive to be accurate and fair, and to take news that would normally be unavailable or heavily censured to those parts of the world that are both afflicted with dictatorship and replete with internally produced propaganda.

"The cancellation of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's grant agreement would be a massive gift to America's enemies," said Steve Capus, the president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. "The Iranian Ayatollahs, Chinese communist leaders, and autocrats in Moscow and Minsk would celebrate the demise of RFE/RL." The Shanghai Daily called the cancellation of Radio Free Asia "excellent news." Elez Biberaj, who retired in 2023 from leading the Voice, said that “The decision to dismantle one of America’s greatest national assets will inflict profound harm on the U.S. image, its global interests, and the promotion of democratic values — damage that no adversary could ever achieve."

The state-sponsored BBC has a bigger budget and more correspondents than the Voice, but the latter is an equally important and much-valued purveyor of information to peoples everywhere who live in the dark corners of our universe. In years past, I was often interviewed by Voice newscasters. A number of my students from Africa later worked for the Voice in Washington. It was and is a well-respected, honorable, and objective disseminator of news and opinion.

That is why Trump hates the Voice and its sister organizations so. Apparently, during his first presidential term the Voice expressed itself critically about some of Trump's edicts and posturings. Now he is taking revenge by eviscerating those news outlets that he thinks offensive. He and Musk claim that shutting down the Voice and its allied broadcasting outlets will "ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda." They, and their acolytes, assert that the Voice, Radio Free Europe, and the rest are "leftist" outlets opposed to Trump. But such charges are pure nonsense, and a cover for one person's pique.

Trump's words echo Putin and Xi, as in so much else that Trump does. He is providing exactly what Putin desires -- the end of unbiased, accurate, information reaching the farthest reaches of Russia. Because of heavy censorship, much of Russia has no idea of the vast casualties (1.7 million?) that Russia has suffered since its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Russians in general hardly are aware that North Koreans are doing the heavy work of fighting in the Kursk region. They do not know that President Volodymyr Zelensky was well-elected by his compatriots and has their support today. Nor do they know that he is a democrat, not a dictator.

Radio Liberty and the Voice were able to take some of that information to the Russian people. Likewise, Radio Liberty, with its secret sources deep in Russia, was able to report accurately on food shortages, cost rises, inflation troubles, and much else that Putin wants to keep secret from his hard-pressed constituents.

Once again, Trump and his minions are content to serve Putin (and Xi, too, especially in the case of Radio Free Asia). Why weaken the battle against Russian disinformation in this very straightforward way? Why cripple our information efforts when a strong provision of truth was essential in winning World War II and supporting indigenous opposition to the Soviet menace throughout Europe and Central Asia?

PS. The other agencies Trump targeted Friday are the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which works to prevent and resolve work stoppages and labor disputes; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a nonpartisan think tank; the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funds and supports museums, libraries and archives; the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which works to prevent and end homelessness; the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which provides financial assistance to struggling communities; and the Minority Business Development Agency, which aims to bolster minority-owned businesses. I was a Fellow a decade ago at the Woodrow Wilson Center. It is Congressionally mandated, but funded mostly privately. It is led by a Republican. Moreover, it is entirely scholarly. I wrote The Corruption Cure (Princeton, 2017) there. Why anyone would want to mess with such a benign outpost of good activity is hard to fathom. Or to target Museum Services! But they do!