Voice of America (VOA), a media organization funded by the government, has become the latest target of the Trump administration. On Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively eliminated VOA’s parent organization, the US Agency for Global Media.
In a social media post on Saturday, VOA director Michael Abramowitz announced that nearly all of the 1,300 staff members had been placed on leave. “I learned this morning that virtually the entire staff of Voice of America — more than 1,300 journalists, producers, and support staff — has been placed on administrative leave today,” Abramowitz stated. “So have I.”
A spokesperson for VOA was not immediately available for comment. The Trump administration confirmed the shutdown of VOA in a statement released on Saturday. “President Donald J. Trump’s executive order on Friday will ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda,” the statement read.
Trump’s order called for the elimination of various government entities that are not required by law, specifically naming seven agencies, including the US Agency for Global Media, which also funds Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, among others. Other agencies mentioned in the order included the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Minority Business Development Agency, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
According to the White House, this action is part of the administration’s broader efforts to downsize the federal government. In the Saturday statement, the White House appeared to criticize the editorial direction of VOA in recent years, citing a former VOA White House correspondent who suggested that the organization had become a “hubris-filled rogue operation often reflecting a leftist bias aligned with partisan national media.”
Established in 1942, VOA has developed into an international broadcasting network that serves a weekly audience of over 354 million people in nearly 50 languages. Carla Babb, a VOA Pentagon correspondent, shared on X that she was one of the full-time employees “placed on administrative leave indefinitely.”
She expressed her concerns, saying, “I’m not allowed to report the news to our hundreds of millions of viewers at this time. Let’s hope this is temporary. A silencing of VOA will be celebrated by communists, autocrats, and ayatollahs whose lies we shed light on.”
