Nearly all remaining Voice of America employees could be fired under plan

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration notified Congress this week of a plan that would eliminate nearly all of the remaining employees at Voice of America (VOA), a federally funded news network that provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedom.

The staff count at VOA would shrink from roughly 1,400 journalists and administrative staff to less than 20 as part of the proposed restructuring, according to a letter dated June 3 and addressed to Republican Senator Jim Risch, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

About a third of those 1,400 workers have already been laid off, however, as the administration has moved rapidly to dismantle a media organisation President Donald Trump has attacked as “the voice of radical America”.

The letter, reviewed by The New York Times, was signed by Ms Kari Lake, a key ally of Mr Trump and a senior adviser for the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA.

The proposed reorganisation is in line with Mr Trump’s orders to slash the size of the federal workforce.

But the President and his allies have also been harshly critical of the outlet’s coverage.

He accused the outlet, which delivers news in countries with authoritarian governments such as Russia, China and Iran, of spreading “anti-American” and partisan “propaganda”.

The letter states that the latest round of firings would lead to “the deletion” of other news services provided by VOA, which broadcast in 49 languages to nearly 100 countries for more than 350 million listeners and readers until March.

Employees and advocates for press freedom had sued in response to the previous cuts that had taken the organisation offline, and in April, a federal judge ordered officials to restore news programming at the agency as mandated by Congress.

Ms Lake suggested in the letter that her agency would be in compliance with both the judge’s order and the law by leaving a small number of VOA employees in place, a decision that she claimed would satisfy a “statutory minimum” for staffing.

By law, the executive branch is required to keep VOA as “a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news” across the globe, “communicating directly with the peoples of the world”. But there is no minimum number of required employees.

A White House spokesperson directed inquiries about the proposal to Ms Lake, who emphasised that it had been approved by career agency employees.

She disputed the notion that nearly all staff would be terminated. Her letter notes that the proposal is subject to change.

As outlined in the letter, the plan would leave only 11 employees for VOA’s radio and television programmes and two positions each for its services targeting Iran, China and Afghanistan.

Including the director, that would be less than 2 per cent of its prior workforce for the news agency that Congress gave around US$260 million (S$334.67 million) for the current fiscal year, according to court filings.

“You can’t make staff this size produce content for a global audience of 360 million,” Ms Patsy Widakuswara, a VOA reporter who is leading a lawsuit against Ms Lake and the media agency, said in a statement. “We are abdicating our voice and influence in the world.”

The news agency, founded in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda, had operated without interruption until March 15, a day after Mr Trump signed an executive order

seeking to gut its parent organisation, the US Agency for Global Media

.

In March, Ms Lake, an unsuccessful candidate for governor and Senate in Arizona who fuelled Mr Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election, declared her own workplace “unsalvageable”.

She also claimed that the US Agency for Global Media and its newsrooms were rampant with “waste, fraud and abuse”, without providing evidence. NYTIMES