Are Voice of America and RFE/RL Next on the DOGE Chopping Block?

Trumpworld hates democracy promotion.

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EVEN AS THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION continues its blitz attack on the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), there are ominous signals of a new MAGA offensive against other important tools of American soft power abroad.

The first salvo was fired on February 8 by Donald Trump loyalist—and currently envoy for special missions and interim director of the Kennedy Center—Richard Grenell:

He was promptly echoed by Elon Musk:

There is no evidence of any steps having been taken so far to shutter the two agencies, whose senior staffers are reportedly working Capitol Hill in a frantic effort to stave off an assault by Musk’s roving DOGE squads. But with the chaos reigning in Washington, their future is uncertain. Their closure, or even a temporary funding freeze that would force them to pause their activities, would severely harm American influence in the global media environment.

But more worrying still, the attacks on Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reflect Trumpworld’s strong antipathy to the international advancement of liberal values—“liberal” in the classical sense that encompasses John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, both strong champions of VOA and RFE/RL: commitment to limited government, individual rights, and an open society based on political, religious, and intellectual pluralism. Trump and Musk’s disdain for liberalism is hardly surprising, but the possibility that it would take the form of dismantling these essential tools is incredibly worrisome.

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LET’S START WITH THE CHARGES leveled against VOA and RFE/RL by Grenell and Musk. The outlets are not filled with “far left activists” or “radical left crazy people.” A look at VOA’s coverage of politically divisive domestic issues shows a mild center-left bias coupled with a good-faith effort at objectivity. For instance, a random look at stories on abortion from last year yields a report on the post-Dobbs landscape for abortion-seeking women broadly sympathetic to abortion rights, but also a scrupulously neutral story on Trump’s tightrope-walking campaign position on the issue quoting Trump, Joe Biden, and a right-to-life activist critical of both Biden and Trump. As for RFE/RL, its bureaus are mostly staffed by local residents or, in the case of authoritarian regimes, dissident expatriates from the country to which the service is directed; a former RFE/RL official described most of them to me as fairly conservative, and “liberal” only in the sense of support for individual rights and the rule of law.

Some conservatives who support the agencies agree that they have a left-leaning slant. Onetime Soviet dissident Yuri Yarim-Agaev, president of the Center for the Study of Totalitarian Ideology, is a frequent contributor to RFE/RL’s Russian bureau, Radio Svoboda. He told me by email that in his past experience, the staff has been far more open to criticism of Trump than of Biden and had tried to steer him away from expressing his opinions about the threat to American democracy from the left. He also mentioned what he sees as excessive “political correctness,” such as editors replacing the word negr—still the standard Russian word for a black person—with afro-amerikanets, not commonly used in Russian. Yet Yarim-Agaev stresses that these sorts of complaints need to be kept in perspective, and that RFE/RL and VOA are, like USAID, “indispensable tools” in the fight against the “totalitarian forces [that] are waging an ideological war against us,” including the Russian, Chinese, Iranian and North Korean regimes. These media agencies, he told me, “should be reformed, improved, and strengthened, but not weakened and in no case destroyed.”

As for Musk’s claim that “no one listens to them anymore,” it seems to reflect the assumption that VOA and RFE/RL are still radio (and only radio) services. In fact, much of their work includes podcasts and videos as well as websites that combine text and audio/video. The YouTube channel of Radio Svoboda has nearly four and a half million subscribers; Current Time, a joint RFE/RL and VOA Russian-language YouTube project, nearly four million. Altogether, VOA—whose services are available in 49 languages—reached an estimated weekly audience of 354 million in 2023. RFE/RL had an estimated weekly radio audience of 47.6 million in in 2024, along with 759 million website visits and 3.9 billion YouTube video views.

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DOES THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION actually plan to destroy VOA and RFE/RL? There has been no formal announcement of a plan to do so, and Trump himself has not commented on Grenell’s or Musk’s social media tirades. It is also worth noting that in December, Trump announced his plan to have MAGA stalwart Kari Lake—former journalist and failed Arizona gubernatorial and Senate candidate—take over as VOA director. Of course, this is itself an alarming pick to say the least, given Lake’s extensive history of pushing fake news not only on the “stolen” 2020 presidential election but on COVID quack remedies (she’s for them) and vaccines (she’s against them).

After Trump’s announcement, Lake tried to strike a conciliatory note in her social media posts, writing that “When it’s doing its job right, @VOANews can change hearts & minds across the globe by delivering a fair & accurate portrayal of America to that overseas audience” and that “We don’t want VOA to be Trump Derangement Syndrome News, nor do we want it to be Trump TV.” But scouring her X timeline after the anti-VOA volleys from Grenell and Musk shows not a single reference to the broadcasting service she only recently claimed to be honored and eager to lead.

Nor has there been any word from L. Brent Bozell III, the right-wing media critic Trump picked to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent organization for VOA, RFE/RL, and five other media outlets. Bozell would have to be confirmed by the Senate; Lake would have to be greenlit by the International Broadcasting Advisory Board, whose members would also require Senate approval (the current members of the bipartisan board were terminated by email en masse in January). For now, the senior leadership of both broadcast services remains in place, and no one is commenting on the record about Grenell’s and Musk’s remarks; but one can easily imagine the anxiety behind the scenes. One official told me that even if they are not formally shut down, a simple pause in funding could do immense harm, forcing staffers to be laid off and programs and websites to go dark—and losing audiences that may never come back.

Which way are MAGA winds are blowing when it comes to VOA and RFE/RL? Nobody knows for sure. In the words of the same official: “It’s thrashing about, but it’s dangerous thrashing about.”

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TO THE ASSAULT ON USAID and the crosshairs on RFE/RL and VOA, we can add yet another target in MAGA’s sights: the National Endowment for Democracy, which Musk has called a “scam” and which the Free Press’s Eli Lake reports is already being crippled by a DOGE-ordered funding block.

The anti-NED effort is not simply about cost-cutting; nor is it simply about weeding out some frivolous or overly “woke” projects. Lake notes that dismantling NED, created under Ronald Reagan in 1983, “would symbolize a major change in U.S. foreign policy, undercutting the notion that democratic ideals foster U.S. global strength and influence” and signaling an abandonment of the view that “promoting democracy around the globe is in the national interest.” The gutting of USAID, and the rumblings about a possible shutdown of RFE/RL and VOA, send the same signal.

None of this should come as a surprise, given that Trumpworld’s hostility to democracy promotion has been evident for some time. A new policy paper from the Center for Renewing America—the think tank founded by Russell Vought, key Project 2025 figure and new director of the Office of Management and Budget—not only attacks NED as a vanguard of “progressive orthodoxy” but also blames its funding of “anti-Russian institutions and activists” in Ukraine for “helping facilitate both the 2004–05 Orange Revolution and the 2014 Maidan Revolution,” which “paved the way for the current Ukraine-Russia war.”

Obviously, there are still plenty of Republicans in Congress who do not share this nihilistic vision of America’s global role—and who understand that if these agencies and broadcasting services are shuttered or gutted, authoritarian and totalitarian powers will readily fill the vacuum with their own aid programs and propaganda. Will they join Democrats in resisting efforts to abandon America’s commitments to liberty? If you’ve seen the congressional Republicans lately, you won’t be getting your hopes up.