The United States President Donald Trump’s administration has commenced mass layoffs on Sunday at the Voice of America (VOA) and other government-funded media, making clear its intent to shut outlets that had long been seen as critical for US influence.
Merely one day after all employees were placed on leave, contractual staff received an email informing them of termination of their appointments effective from the end of March.
Several employees confirmed to AFP that the message instructed contractors to “immediately cease all work and are prohibited from accessing 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 United States.
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.
Voice of America, created during World War II, broadcasts in 49 languages worldwide and aims to reach countries without media freedom.
Trump signed an executive order on Friday targeting VOA’s parent, 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 and had requested $950 million for the current fiscal year.
With VOA in limbo, some of its services have switched to playing music for lack of new programming.
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, in a statement on Saturday, said that “taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda,” a charge rarely levelled before Trump at staid VOA, long aimed at countering communism.
Trump regularly criticizes media coverage of him and has questioned the wisdom of funding VOA when it has a “firewall” ensuring its editorial independence.
The cuts come as China and Russia invest heavily in state media to compete with Western narratives. China often offers 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 demonizing narratives propagated by VOA will ultimately become a laughingstock of the times,” it said.
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