President Donald Trump and Elon Musk after looking at Tesla vehicles on the South Lawn of the White House on March 11, 2025. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Kari Lake, whom Trump named as the VOA's next chief in December, is currently serving as senior advisor at the U.S. Agency for Global Media and told employees to "check your email" for more information on their employment futures.
"The President has issued an Executive Order titled Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy. It affects USAGM and its outlets VOA and OCB. If you are an employee of the agency please check your email immediately for more information," Lake, who is also a former news anchor and Republican Arizona political candidate, posted to X. OCB refers to the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which is a Spanish language, government-funded radio and TV broadcaster that operates Radio and TV Martí in Miami, Florida.
Employees received an email on Saturday detailing that their employment was terminated, the Wall Street Journal reported, though it is unclear how many employees were affected.
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Sigange outside of the Voice of America headquarters in Washington, D.C., on March 15, 2025. (Getty Images)
Just days after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, VOA told its employees to "avoid calling Hamas and its members terrorists, except in quotes," National Review reported that year.
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The government-funded news outlet has also come under fire for other stories across the years, including running an article in 2020 that asked, "What Is 'White Privilege' and Whom Does It Help?" It was also criticized over publishing a story and video that was compared to a Biden campaign video in 2020, and downplaying the Hunter Biden laptop controversy that rocked the 2020 presidential campaign in its waning days.
President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol on March 4, 2025. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
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"I have monitored the agency’s bureaucracy along with many of its reporters and concluded that it has essentially become a hubris-filled rogue operation often reflecting a leftist bias aligned with partisan national media," a former VOA employee wrote in an op-ed last year calling for the outlet's dismantling. "It has sought to avoid accountability for violations of journalistic standards and mismanagement."
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-orders-dismantling-government-funded-left-wing-media-outlet-voa