Kari Lake's dismantling of VOA is a full-blown fiasco
It's just as shambolic as her political career.
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During the first Trump administration, Trump put filmmaker Michael Pack, an associate of Steve Bannon's, in charge of the US Agency for Global Media.
Pack fired the heads of Voice of America and the other networks under USAGM's purview, installed Trump loyalists on governing boards, paid a Republican-aligned law firm $1.6 million in a no-bid contract to compile dossiers on career executives, rescinded the rules protecting journalists from political interference, and blocked visa renewals for foreign journalists, suggesting they might be spies.
This time around, it's worse.
A year ago, Trump signed an executive order targeting USAGM for destruction, along with several other “woke” agencies like the Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Minority Business Development Agency, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Each of these was created by Congress with a statutory mandate to do things and funded in the budget. Nonetheless, Trump demanded they “be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”
So far, he’s been unable to do it, thanks to the intervention of an 83-year-old Reagan appointee. And annoyingly, Congress refused to zero out funding for the media outlets, which have been a major source of American soft power since World War II. Now the president seems to be trimming his sails, hoping instead to turn USAGM into a North Korea-style state mouthpiece to broadcast MAGA propaganda worldwide.
Silencing America’s Voice
For more than 80 years, Voice of America and its sister networks, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, Open Technology Fund, and Office of Cuba Broadcasting, have beamed high-quality media across the globe.
In 2024, USAGM’s partners reached an average of 427 million people every week. Born as a counter-propaganda campaign against the Nazis, VOA outlasted the Soviet Union and transitioned to the digital age, fulfilling its statutory mandate to report the news accurately and independently, free from political interference.
This put it crosswise with Trump, who routinely refers to the press as “the enemy of the people,” a term borrowed from Stalin.
On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to put Kari Lake, Arizona’s sorest loser, in charge of VOA “to 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 the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, which must approve the VOA director, lacked a quorum after Trump fired most of its members. So in March of last year, Lake was installed as “Senior Adviser to the Acting CEO” of USAGM and later as Acting CEO, in flagrant disregard of the constitutional requirement that the CEO be confirmed by the Senate.
Within 24 hours of the executive order, Lake had placed 1,042 of USAGM’s 1,147 full-time employees on leave, terminated contracts with 598 personal service contractors, and halted broadcasts to whole regions of the globe.
In a cursory “Statutory Minimum Memorandum” devoid of any policy or legal analysis, Lake informed Congress that USAGM, an agency with an $882 million budget in 2024, could fulfill its statutory duties with a staff of just 68. Lake, who called USAGM “a rotten piece of fish” and a vector for foreign propaganda, proposed to replace much of its original reporting with broadcasts from such Trump-friendly outlets as One America News.
Judges doing the most
The fired journalists sued, and the case wound up on the docket of Judge Royce Lamberth, who ordered USAGM to bring back the fired employees and resume programming. The DC Circuit stayed the employee-restoration piece while the case proceeded, but not the programming requirement, and the agency grudgingly resumed skeletal operations.
This month, Judge Lamberth granted summary judgment to the plaintiffs. On March 7, he held that Lake was never lawfully appointed as Acting CEO, and thus everything she did in that capacity was void, including firing more than a thousand people. Ten days later, he struck down the Statutory Minimum Memorandum as arbitrary and capricious and ordered all the fired employees be returned to work by March 23. He found that the agency had failed to consider statutory broadcasting requirements, congressional appropriations, reliance interests, or the legal mandate to consult the State Department before deleting language services.
“Not only is there an absence of ‘reasoned analysis’ from the defendants,” Lamberth wrote, “there is an absence of any analysis whatsoever.”
The government appealed, albeit in somewhat shambolic fashion, requesting virtually the same relief — not bringing back all the fired employees at once — from Judge Lamberth and the DC Circuit. This backfired when Judge Lamberth agreed to let them re-onboard just 70 employees per week; at which point, the journalists moved to dismiss the government’s appeal as moot. That dispute is still pending, but in the meantime, another USAGM case just landed on Judge Lamberth’s docket.
Burning down the firewall
The International Broadcasting Act requires the USAGM CEO to “respect the professional independence and integrity” of the agency’s journalists and prohibits political interference with editorial content. But Lake has been quite open about wanting to tear down this firewall.
In testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Lake said, “We need to make sure the firewall is gone. We should be able to have control over what kind of content goes out. It should be in alignment with our foreign policy.” And last July, she warned that, “With the editorial firewall at Voice of America, they could go completely rogue, and the President couldn’t pick up the phone and stop them. There are no guardrails.”
Congress never repealed the firewall, but a lawsuit filed Monday claims that Lake and her underlings have simply ignored it, forcing VOA to publish Trump administration talking points as news and censoring content they don’t like.
For example, journalist Ali Javanmardi is employed by USAGM, but still oversees VOA’s Persian, Kurdish, and Afghan services — itself a violation of the firewall, which is supposed to insulate news-gathering from management. On January 16, he sent a memo to the entire Persian news staff reading, “Effective immediately, all guest appearances — including live guests, pre-recorded guests, and guests whose soundbites are used in packages — must be approved by me in advance.”
Javanmardi banned all mentions of exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, son of the deposed former Iranian leader and a popular figure in his own right. Pahlavi has lived in the US for decades, and is sometimes mentioned as a potential pro-American leader of Iran should the current government fall.
Javanmardi spent years attacking Pahlavi, including salacious allegations about his wife, and went so far as to censor video of protesters shouting the Pahlavi family name. A journalist who complained about this censorship had his contract terminated days later.
The complaint alleges that Javanmardi favors coverage of Mojahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, an Iranian opposition group which some describe as a cult. It enjoys little support inside Iran and was previously designated by the US government as a foreign terrorist organization. After being de-designated in 2012, it cultivated deep ties to Republican figures including Rudy Giuliani and John Bolton.
VOA’s Mandarin Service is being overseen by Hui Jing, another USAGM employee whose previous gig was at the Epoch Times (a rabidly pro-Trump/anti-CCP outfit which is implicated in a massive money laundering scheme). One January 2026 article, which featured an AI-generated image of Trump superimposed over an American flag and a world map, touted his “dealmaking ability” in resolving eight global conflicts — language lifted nearly verbatim from White House press releases. The piece reads less like VOA journalism and more like something produced by the White House communications shop … which is exactly how Lake views her role.
“We want to be making sure we’re putting news out that falls within the parameters of what our national security strategy is and our foreign policy strategy, and tell America’s story,” she gabbled to right-wing site Gateway Pundit last month. “What we’re doing right now is we’re getting the President’s message out.”
The plaintiffs have designated the newest suit as related to the prior case so it, too, will land on Judge Lamberth’s docket.
Figurehead
On March 12, Trump nominated Sarah Rogers, currently Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs, to serve as permanent CEO of USAGM.
The previous CEO, Amanda Bennett, was a career journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize and went on to serve on the organization’s board, as well as the boards of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the German Marshall Fund, and the Neiman Fellowship program at Harvard University. Rogers, by contrast, is an extremely online right-wing lawyer who previously represented the NRA and Philip Morris, and is prone to spouting dogwhistles like “AI with a Western soul.”
But Rogers is certainly confirmable, and was in fact already blessed once by the Senate for her State Department role. Rogers says she intends to keep her State Department job while running USAGM — a strong indication that she’ll be CEO in name only. Indeed, Lake seemed to confirm as much, tweeting that she’s staying right where she is, and nothing will change.
This apparent sham will certainly draw further legal challenge. But even if these journalists win, it will take decades to rebuild what Lake has torn down in just 18 months.
We’ll need a lot of AI slop to make this look great … again.
That’s it for today
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The hubris of it all. They think we are stupid. I hope they all land in the same prison. 😞
You would have to be a dedicated public servant to want to go back to a workplace that treated you so shabbily. The drown it in the bathtub guy, forget his name, and Project 2025, he probably works for them, are traitors and need to be treated accordingly. When I worked on mansions in Weston Mass, the bathtub guy was living there. Never saw him but just knowing he was in the same town gave me the creeps. I'll have to look him up, on google I mean.