Trump orders mass firings at Voice of America

The administration of former US President Donald Trump has begun mass layoffs at Voice of America (VOA) and other US-funded media outlets, signaling a major shift in their operations.  

On Sunday, just a day after placing all employees on leave, contractual staff received an email notifying them of their termination, effective at the end of March.

The email, confirmed by multiple employees, instructed contractors to “cease all work immediately” and barred them from accessing agency buildings and systems.

Contractors make up a significant portion of VOA’s workforce, particularly in non-English language services. Although specific figures were not readily available, the move is expected to have a major impact on the organization, which has been a key player in US international broadcasting.

Many contractors are not US citizens, meaning they likely depend on their soon-to-disappear jobs for visas to stay in the United States.

Most full-time VOA staff, who have more legal protections, were not immediately terminated but remain on administrative leave and have been told not to work.

Voice of America, created during World War II, broadcast around the world in 49 languages with a mission to reach countries without media freedom.

Liam Scott, a VOA reporter who covers press freedom and disinformation, said he was notified that he also reported that he was being dismissed as of March 31.

The Trump administration’s destruction of VOA and sister outlets “are part of its efforts to dismantle the government more broadly — but it’s also part of the administration’s broader assault on press freedom and the media,” he wrote on X.

“I’ve covered press freedom for a long time, and I’ve never seen something like what’s happened in the US over the past couple of months.”

With VOA in limbo, some of its services have switched to playing music for lack of new programming.

Trump signed an executive order Friday targeting VOA’s parent US Agency for Global Media in his latest sweeping cuts to the federal government.

The agency had 3,384 employees in the 2023 fiscal year. It had requested $950 million for the current fiscal year.

The sweeping cuts also froze Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, formed in the Cold War to reach the former Soviet bloc, and Radio Free Asia, established to provide reporting to China, North Korea and other Asian countries with heavily restricted media.

Other US-funded outlets being gutted include Radio Farda, a Persian-language broadcaster blocked by Iran’s government, and Alhurra, an Arabic-language network established after the Iraq invasion in the face of highly critical coverage by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera.

The White House said in a statement Saturday that “taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda,” a charge rarely leveled before Trump at the staid VOA, long aimed at countering communism.

Trump regularly criticizes media coverage of him and has questioned the wisdom of funding VOA when it has a “firewall” ensuring its editorial independence.

Trump, with the advice of tech billionaire Elon Musk, has vowed to drastically reduce the size of government to make way for tax cuts. His administration has already ended the vast majority of foreign development assistance and moved to eviscerate the Education Department.

The moves come as China and Russia invest heavily in state media to compete with Western narratives, with China often offering free content to outlets in the developing world.

In an editorial on the demise of VOA, China’s state-run Global Times said that “the monopoly of information held by some traditional Western media is being shattered.”

“As more Americans begin to break through their information cocoons and see a real world and a multidimensional China, the demonizing narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughingstock of the times,” it said.