United States Agency for Global Media

VOA is one of six entities overseen by the United States Agency for Global Media.

The digital, web, and mobile news organization broadcasts in 49 languages and previously reached more than 361 million people worldwide.

In March 2025, President Trump ordered USAGM to eliminate what his administration described as unnecessary functions and reduce remaining operations to the minimum required by law.

The resulting cuts placed hundreds of VOA employees on administrative leave and sharply reduced broadcasting.

By July 2026, approximately 420 VOA employees remained on paid administrative leave at an estimated cost of $1.6 million per week, or about $82.8 million annually.

according to a report from the Office of the Inspector General.

The Office of the Inspector General found that USAGM could not demonstrate that it sufficiently assessed the impact that the loss of experienced personnel would have on operations, the report read.

For example, OIG found that tactical facilities and related support staff were not adequately considered when determining which employees to put on administrative leave.

Political figure, former news anchor from Arizona.

She was nominated to run, uh, the United States Agency for Global Media, which operates Voice of America News, but a judge ruled her appointment was illegal.

This was somewhat recent.

She's more known for with Trump denying the results of the 2020 presidential election, running for Arizona governor in 2022 and losing the election, then running for Senate in Arizona in 2024 and losing that election.

Let's continue here.

The majority of its funding came from the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the U.S. government body that evolved out of the Cold War CIA propaganda outlets like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America.

Yeah, so it says that the funding came from these propaganda outlets by no other than the CIA and some of the Western agencies that, for better or worse, you can argue there's arguments for why they're necessary and why they should be dismantled.

After the Snowden leaks, Congress expanded Open Internet Funding and the Open Technology Fund, an offshoot of Radio Free Asia.

The report paints perhaps the clearest picture yet of how much the Trump administration effort to shutter the government-funded news outlet has cost taxpayers.

USAGM Strategy Director Kate Nieper and VOA White House Bureau Chief Patsy Winokaswara, plaintiffs in a separate employee lawsuit against the government, said the harm is to taxpayers but also VOA's audience.

The report did not measure the deeper damage of losing the attention of 360 mega-people who trusted and relied on VOA every week.

Thousands of journalists built that trust over decades and we fear It may be irreplaceable.

More about this from Politico.com via Sheldon Harvey, CIDX.

USAGM is rebuilding what the administration dismantled in the early months of Trump's second term.

Includes reinstating canceled contracts, rehiring staff and buying new equipment, while paying 420 employees $3.2 million every two weeks to remain on leave, according to a new State Department IG report.

Prior to the cuts, VOA broadcast in 49 languages.

The report says the government did not conduct a detailed analysis of the impact or cost before it made these cuts.

President Trump issued an executive order back in March of 2025, which directed the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA, to be shrunk to the minimum presence and function required by law, to put nearly 1,000 workers on leave.

The effort was originally led by Trump ally, Kari Lake, but in March, a judge ruled that she broke the law in running the VOA.

Trump then nominated state department official Sarah Rogers for the role.

And then lo and behold, in 2013, dun-da-da, went away.

In 2012, Barack Obama signed a modernization act because he said, "Well, there's all this social media, right? And the information is traveling more freely and more readily." And so the next thing you know, by July 2nd, 2013, you had Americans basically seeing material that the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors had made for foreign audiences.

You had Americans seeing it here, and it was sold as transparency.

But basically, it was the government [laughs] saying, "Well, this is what we want everybody to think." And then they paired it together with USAID and the NGOs.