Less than a week after more than 500 contractors were terminated from Voice of America, U.S. Agency for Global Media senior adviser Kari Lake sent Congress a letter detailing her reduction-in-force plan to eliminate most of the roughly 800 full-time employees remaining at the government-funded news outlet.
In her letter sent on Tuesday to Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs chairman James Risch (R-ID), which was obtained and reviewed by The Independent, Lake referenced Donald Trump’s executive order in March that called for the reduction of all “non-statutory components and functions” to be eliminated from the agency, which is the agency that oversees VOA and other state-run media outlets.
Noting that the president directed that the agency needed to reduce its “associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law,” she laid out a firing plan that would bring the number of VOA positions down to just 18, while the entirety of the media agency would have a staff of just 81.
The Washington Post first reported on Lake’s letter to Congress.
According to the plan, which Lake said was developed by career government staffers, Voice of America would have just 11 employees manning the network’s broadcast operations, VOA news center and FM programming. Two employees each would handle the Farsi, China and Afghanistan broadcast services, and the network will retain a director.
Additionally, roughly 13 people across the media agency will be designated as “senior executive service,” which includes the VOA director, the agency’s CEO and the director of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which is headquartered in Florida.
The media agency will also retain 17 support positions, most of which are designated “back office support” and entail security, finance and human resources. Another two staffers will handle engineering and transmission.
Notably, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting will keep all 33 of its staff, with the agency plan stating that based on Trump’s executive order, “the recommendation is to retain all positions in the Miami, FL and Marathon, FL competitive areas based on the statutory requirements for Cuba broadcasting.”
Lake and the media agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Lake – a former TV anchor and twice-failed Arizona political candidate – boasted to The Washington Post last month about how she’d “continue to scale back the bloat at [the agency] and make an archaic dinosaur into something worthy of being funded by hardworking Americans. She added: “Buckle up. There’s more to come.”
With Voice of America being reduced to less than a skeleton staff, especially as it had roughly 1,300 full-time employees and contractors before the president’s order, the assumption is that much of VOA’s news programming going forward will be filled by MAGA cable channel One America News, which Lake made a deal with last month as a content provider.
The majority of VOA’s staff have been on paid administrative leave after the president ordered the media agency to be cut down, which was portrayed as part of the administration’s push to reduce the federal bureaucracy.
Employees of VOA are currently suing the Trump administration, saying the president doesn’t have the authority to dismantle the outlet as it was created by Congress. However, while a federal judge issued an injunction in late April that would have allowed the employees to return to work, an appellate court stayed the majority of that ruling, leaving staffers stuck in limbo.
Since then, Lake has brought back a couple of dozen VOA employees to keep the network staffed at a “statutory minimum.” The staffers who have returned to work, however, state that they are “angry most of the time” and the “amount of programming that’s being produced is not a credible replacement for what was on air before.”
Reacting to the new reduction-in-force plan that would eliminate essentially the entirety of Voice of America, the plaintiffs in the current lawsuit seeking to block the president’s executive order lamented over the tragedy of the network’s impending death.
“It is absurd to slash an agency with a staff of over 1300 down to 80 and say it can still function according to what’s mandated by law,” VOA White House bureau chief Patsy Widakuswara. “And only 17 of those positions are allocated for VOA journalists and broadcast technicians. You can’t make staff this size produce content for a global audience of 360 million weekly. It’s comical if it weren’t so tragic – we’re not just losing our jobs and journalism, we are abdicating our voice and influence in the world.”
Jessica Jerreat, Voice of America’s press freedom editor, said VOA’s success and value “has always been its ability to reach foreign audiences in their own languages with news about US ideals and policy.” Noting that many of its foreign-language broadcasts around the world helped “break through censorship” and countered “the spread of Russian disinformation,” Jerreat expressed concern about the void that will now be left.
“The US is a global leader,” she told The Independent. “That role has been reflected in the languages VOA broadcasts. Cutting those services from 49 to 4 cuts the US off from the global conversation.”
Kate Neeper, Director of Strategy and Performance Assessment at the media agency, also bemoaned that Lake’s plan “seeks to end a decades-long mission of providing news and information in repressive media environments around the world, particularly those targeted with propaganda by America’s adversaries.”
“It would entirely abandon major world regions where China and Russia have massive media operations, including Africa, Latin America, Russia and Eurasia, and Southeast Asia,” she continued. “The plan also eliminates every agency function tasked with measuring and evaluating the effectiveness and reach of programming, eliminating the agency’s ability to understand its own performance and fulfill mandatory government accountability processes.”