On March 14, 2025, President Donald Trump ordered the U.S. Agency for Global Media to reduce its operations to the “minimum presence and function required by law.” By the next day, USAGM was terminating grants, placing employees on administrative leave and canceling contracts.

Voice of America was effectively silenced. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Network were left fighting for funding and survival as the administration tore into the country’s international broadcasting system.

The State Department’s Office of Inspector General found last month that USAGM could not demonstrate that it had adequately weighed the costs and benefits of its reductions. It also failed to take the necessary steps to ensure that critical services continued.

According to the report, USAGM did not sufficiently consider the full collection of laws and regulations governing the agency when determining what it was legally required to preserve. Meanwhile, the administration has been paying 420 employees $3.2 million every two weeks to remain on leave.

The decisions came before the understanding. Trump and his appointee, Kari Lake, did not deliver serious reform, but instead unleashed a rushed dismantling without adequate clarity about either the law or America’s needs.

I spent years working inside this system at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty as a reporter, editor and newsroom leader. It needed reform, but reform requires understanding what should change and what remains valuable.

At a June 26, 2025, congressional hearing, lawmakers cited statements from the presidents of RFE/RL, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks. They said Lake had spent “not a single minute” with them or their senior teams before terminating their grants.

Lake pointed to lawsuits filed against USAGM and told lawmakers, “It’s hard to meet with somebody when they’re suing you.” That did not answer the central question of what Lake did before the lawsuits and before the decisions were made.

Lake did not have to agree with the network leaders, and she could have concluded that some services deserved cuts. But she still had a responsibility to understand what she was eliminating before wielding the ax.

Some consequences were immediate. After the grants were cut, Radio Free Asia announced that half of its language services would stop producing new content, including Tibetan, Burmese, Lao and Uyghur, while its English service and Asia Fact Check Lab were also affected.

Other losses cannot be neatly entered into a spreadsheet. Journalists who spent years cultivating sources inside Afghanistan and editors who understand Central Asia’s languages, politics and disinformation networks cannot simply be replaced.

Trust is the hardest asset for these newsrooms to build. Audiences in closed societies are surrounded by information, but credible information is far more difficult to find, and abandoning those audiences creates an opening that authoritarian governments are eager to exploit.

In February 2025, the month before Trump ordered the USAGM cuts, Russia’s Sputnik opened a major editorial center in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It launched Amharic language operations and later began radio broadcasting in Amharic and English, claiming its programs could reach 6 million listeners in Addis Ababa and surrounding areas.

Voice of America once mattered because audiences trusted its journalists to report independently despite receiving U.S. government funding. Yet in July 2025, it began translating and publishing White House supplied videos about America’s 250th anniversary and the nation’s founders.

The deterioration became even more visible during the U.S. war with Iran. After the U.S. struck a girls’ school in Minab and killed scores of civilians, many of them children, Voice of America Persian’s website went days without publishing a story specifically about the bombing.

When a story finally appeared, it centered Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s statement that the United States would not deliberately target a school. A lawsuit also said Voice of America’s Mandarin Service published an artificial intelligence generated image showing a triumphant looking Trump in front of an American flag.

Voice of America should report what a president says and does, not become an instrument for promoting that president. If it begins sounding like the governments it covers, it forfeits the credibility that made it useful in Iran, China, Russia, Afghanistan and other closed societies.

The inspector general concluded that the reductions diminished USAGM’s ability to fulfill its central legal mission. Its recommendations called for a comprehensive plan, congressional and stakeholder input, measurable goals, workforce planning, an implementation team and better communication.

That is how serious reform should begin. Washington must determine what America needs from international broadcasting, preserve what works, rebuild what matters and demand independence and accountability after dismantling an information capability that took generations to create.