President Donald Trump’s administration initiated mass layoffs at Voice of America and other US-funded media stations on Sunday, signalling its intention to eviscerate outlets long regarded as essential to US influence.
Just one day after all employees were placed on leave, contract workers received an email informing them that their employment will be terminated at the end of March.
The email, reported to AFP by numerous employees, instructed contractors that “you must cease all work immediately and are not permitted to access any agency buildings or systems.”
Contractors make up a large portion of VOA’s workforce and dominate staffing in non-English language services, though recent data was not immediately available.
Many contractors are not US citizens, thus they will most likely rely on their soon-to-be-defunct jobs for visas to remain in the United States.
Full-time VOA employees, who have additional legal safeguards, were not immediately terminated, but instead placed on administrative leave and told not to work.
Voice of America, founded after WWII, broadcasts in 49 languages around the world with the goal of reaching countries that do not have free media.
Trump signed an executive order on Friday targeting VOA’s parent, the US Agency for Global Media, as part of his latest round of federal budget cuts.
The agency had 3,384 workers in fiscal year 2023. It had asked for $950 million for the current fiscal year.
With VOA in limbo, some of its services have shifted to playing music due to a lack of new content.
The sweeping cuts also halted Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which was founded during the Cold War to reach the former Soviet bloc, as well as Radio Free Asia, which was designed to offer reporting to China, North Korea, and other Asian countries with severely limited media.
Other US-funded stations being shut down include Radio Farda, a Persian-language broadcaster barred by Iran’s government, and Alhurra, an Arabic-language network founded after the Iraq invasion in response to extremely critical coverage by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera.
The White House stated in a statement Saturday that “taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda,” an accusation rarely levied at VOA, which has traditionally been geared at fighting communism.
Trump frequently criticises media coverage of him and has questioned the rationale of subsidising VOA, which has a “firewall” that ensures its editorial independence.
The cuts come as China and Russia make significant investments in state media to compete with Western narratives, with China frequently providing free programming to developing-world outlets.
In an editorial lamenting the loss of VOA, China’s state-run Global Times stated 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 demonising narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughingstock of the times,” it said.
