Trump administration begins mass layoffs at Voice of America

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump's administration on Sunday (Mar 16) began mass layoffs at Voice of America (VOA) and other United States-funded media, making clear its intent to gut outlets long seen as critical for US influence.

Just a day after all employees were put on leave, staff working on a contractual basis received an email notifying them that they were 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 they likely depend on their soon-to-disappear jobs for visas to stay in the US.

Most full-time VOA staff, who have more legal protections, were not immediately terminated but remain on administrative leave and have been told not to work.

VOA, created during World War II, broadcast around the world in 49 languages with a mission to reach countries without media freedom.

With it in limbo, some of VOA's services have switched to playing music for lack of new programming.

Liam Scott, a VOA reporter who covers press freedom and disinformation, said he was notified that he also reported that he was being dismissed as of Mar 31.

The Trump administration's destruction of VOA and sister outlets "are part of its efforts to dismantle the government more broadly - but it's also part of the administration's broader assault on press freedom and the media", he wrote on X.

"I've covered press freedom for a long time, and I've never seen something like what's happened in the US over the past couple of months."

The Association for International Broadcasting (AIB), the global trade association for broadcast journalism, said it was "highly concerned" by the developments at VOA.

"These measures represent a significant setback for global media freedom and threaten the ability of millions of people worldwide to access impartial, fact-based journalism," it said in a statement.

Cutting VOA's funding and suspending its operations will undermine media freedom, reduce access to credible information and damage America’s global credibility, the AIB said.

“At a time when the world is looking to the US to be (the) global player for peace and freedom, cutting funding for US international media - one of the main instruments underpinning this goal - seems the wrong direction to take,” AIB CEO Simon Spanswick said.

SWEEPING CUTS

Trump signed an executive order on Friday targeting VOA's parent 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 US$950 million for the current fiscal year.

The sweeping cuts also froze Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, formed in the Cold War to reach the former Soviet bloc, and Radio Free Asia, established to provide reporting to China, North Korea and other Asian countries with heavily restricted media.

Other US-funded outlets being gutted include Radio Farda, a Persian-language broadcaster blocked by Iran's government, and Alhurra, an Arabic-language network established after the Iraq invasion in the face of highly critical coverage by Qatar-based Al-Jazeera.

The White House said in a statement on Saturday that "taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda," a charge rarely levelled before Trump at the staid VOA, long aimed at countering communism.

Trump regularly criticises media coverage of him and has questioned the wisdom of funding VOA when it has a "firewall" ensuring its editorial independence.

Trump, with the advice of tech billionaire Elon Musk, has vowed to drastically reduce the size of government to make way for tax cuts. His administration has already ended the vast majority of foreign development assistance and moved to eviscerate the Education Department.

The moves come as China and Russia invest heavily in state media to compete with Western narratives, with China often offering free content to outlets in the developing world.

In an editorial on the demise of VOA, China's state-run Global Times said 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.