'Virtually the entire staff' of Voice of America placed on leave after Trump order guts broadcaster, director says
Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post via Getty Images
- Voice of America, a government-funded media outlet, became the latest target of the Trump administration.
- President Donald Trump signed an EO Friday eliminating VOA's parent, the US Agency for Global Media.
- VOA director Michael Abramowitz said virtually the entire staff of 1,300 was placed on leave.
Voice of America, a government-funded broadcasting service that was established during World War II to combat Nazi propaganda, was effectively shut down, following President Donald Trump's Friday executive order.
"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," Michael Abramowitz, VOA director, said in a social media post on Saturday. "So have I."
A spokesperson for VOA could not immediately be reached for comment.
The Trump administration confirmed the elimination of the VOA in a Saturday statement.
"President Donald J. Trump's executive order on Friday will ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda," the statement said.
Trump's order from Friday ordered the elimination of government entities that are not statutorily-mandated, naming seven agencies including VOA's parent, the US Agency for Global Media. The USAGM also funds Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, among other networks.
Other agencies named in the order included the US Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Minority Business Development Agency, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
The move, according to the White House, was a continuation of the Trump administration's effort to reduce the size of the federal government.
In the Saturday statement, the White House appeared to criticize the VOA's editorial decisions from the past several years, quoting a former VOA White House correspondent who said that the network had become a "hubris-filled rogue operation often reflecting a leftist bias aligned with partisan national media."
VOA was established in 1942 and has grown into an international broadcasting network serving a weekly audience of more than 354 million people in nearly 50 languages, according to the outlet.
Carla Babb, a VOA Pentagon correspondent, said on X she was one of the full-time employees "placed on administrative leave indefinitely."
"I'm not allowed to report the news to our hundreds of millions of viewers at this time. Let's hope this is temporary," Babb wrote. "A silencing of VOA will be celebrated by communists, autocrats and ayatollahs whose lies we shed light on."