In an executive order signed late Friday, Donald Trump effectively dismantled seven more federal agencies, this time with cuts that will impact work on homelessness, libraries, support for minority-owned businesses, and the US Agency for Global Media, which funds Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. The cuts are expected to leave thousands more federal workers unemployed; in the case of VOA, it furthers a specific vendetta Trump has had since his first term.
The order will affect the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the United States Agency for Global Media, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency. It instructs the head of each agency to submit a report to the Office of Management and Budget “explaining which components or functions of the governmental entity, if any, are statutorily required and to what extent.” In practice, as has happened with other federal agencies in recent weeks, it’s expected to leave these agencies a shell of themselves and fundamentally nonexistent; in the case of the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, it destroys the only federal agency solely focused on addressing the homelessness crisis.
During his first term, Trump called VOA’s reporting “disgraceful.” This time around, he placed Trump loyalist and 2020 election denier Kari Lake as a “special advisor” to the agency.
The move against the US Agency for Global Media has attracted the most attention, and could have the largest implications abroad. VOA specifically has been active since the 1940s, where it broadcast stories into Germany that were meant to counter Nazi propaganda. During his first term, Trump called VOA’s reporting “disgraceful.” This time around, he placed Trump loyalist and 2020 election denier Kari Lake as a “special advisor” to the agency. In December, he wrote that she would “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.”
Lake made it immediately clear that she wouldn’t respect VOA’s editorial independence, telling a crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference, “VOA has been telling America’s story to the world for 83 years this Monday. Sometimes the coverage has been incredible, and sometimes it’s been pitiful. We are fighting an information war, and there’s no better weapon than the truth, and I believe VOA could be that weapon.”
VOA made other efforts to appease Trump, including placing leading journalist Steve Herman on leave for supposedly anti-Trump comments. Under Lake, the organization also canceled millions of dollars in contracts with other news agencies, including the Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse.
Some of the seven agencies that were just gutted could challenge the order in court; the US Agency for Global Media, for instance, was founded by a congressional charter and could argue that it can’t be dismantled by an executive order. The authority of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to make the staggering cuts they’ve already made to government agencies is also being challenged in numerous lawsuits.
