Trump shutters Voice Of America, US soft-power icon
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US President Donald Trump's administration on Sunday began mass layoffs at Voice of America and other US-funded media, in a sweeping shake-up of the American soft-power projection.
On Saturday, the Trump administration ordered nearly 1,300 Voice Of America workers to be put on leave.
On Monday, staff working on a contractual basis received an email notifying them that they would be terminated at the end of March.
The email, confirmed to AFP by several employees, told contractors that "you must cease all work immediately and are not permitted to access any agency buildings or systems".
Contractors make up much of VOA's workforce and dominate staffing in the non-English language services, although recent figures were not immediately available.
Many contractors are not US citizens, meaning those who depend on job visas to stay in the United States will likely have to leave the country.
Most full-time VOA staff were not immediately terminated but remain on administrative leave and have been told not to work.
Trump’s order also terminated funding for VOA’s sister broadcasters, such as Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
Voice of America was founded during WWII as an American news network to broadcast into territory held by the Axis powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.
During the Cold War, it was designed to broadcast western news to people living behind the Iron Curtain in the Soviet Union. However, it also broadcast across the Global South, where the US and Soviet Union competed for influence. The US and Soviet Union both competed with propaganda for influence across the globe.
With VOA in limbo, some of its services have switched to playing music because of a lack of new programming.
Trump signed an executive order on Friday targeting VOA's parent agency, the 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 $950m for the current fiscal year.
Other US-funded outlets being gutted include Radio Farda, a Persian-language broadcaster blocked by Iran's government, and Al-hurra, an Arabic-language network established after the US invasion of Iraq to combat Al-Jazeera’s coverage of the American-led invasion.
The White House said in a statement on Saturday that "taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda”.
The move underscores how the Trump administration is tearing up the traditional pillars of American diplomacy and soft power across the globe as it looks to re-establish a new order with great powers like Russia and China.
China's state-run Global Times lauded VOA’s closure in an opinion article, saying 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," the article said.
