The Trump administration on Thursday fired nearly 600 employees at Voice of America, a federally funded news network that provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedoms.
The layoffs targeted contractors, most of them journalists but also some administrative employees, and amounted to more than a third of Voice of America’s staff. They signalled that the Trump administration planned to continue its efforts to dismantle the broadcaster despite a court ruling last month that ordered the federal government to maintain robust news programming at the network, which President Donald Trump has called “the voice of radical America”.
In another sign of the Trump administration’s hostility toward the broadcaster, the federal building in Washington that houses the media organisation was put up for sale Thursday.
Michael Abramowitz, the director of Voice of America, said in an email to his staff Thursday that the firings were “inexplicable”.
“I am heartbroken,” he said. Abramowitz has sued to stop the Trump administration from closing the news organisation.
Kari Lake, a senior adviser at the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America, said that the Trump administration had acted within its legal authority.
“We are in the process of rightsizing the agency and reducing the federal bureaucracy to meet administration priorities,” Lake, who is leading the efforts to ramp down the operations of Voice of America, said in a statement. “We will continue to scale back the bloat at USAGM and make an archaic dinosaur into something worthy of being funded by hardworking Americans.”
She added: “Buckle up. There’s more to come.”
Some of the journalists who were terminated Thursday were from countries with repressive governments that persecute journalists for independent reporting, Abramowitz said in the email to employees Thursday.
Those journalists now have to leave the United States by the end of June, as their immigration status is tied to employment at the news organisation.
In a letter sent Thursday to employees who had been fired, the Trump administration cited “the government’s convenience” as a reason for the terminations. The employees were under so-called personal services contracts, making them easier to let go than regular full-time employees with full civil service protections.
Trump has accused the outlet, which delivers news to countries with repressive regimes — including Russia, China and Iran — of spreading “anti-American” and partisan “propaganda”.
In March, Lake, a Trump ally and unsuccessful candidate for governor and Senate in Arizona, had declared her own workplace “unsalvageable”. She has also claimed that the US Agency for Global Media and its newsrooms were rampant with “waste, fraud and abuse,” without providing evidence.
Lake said last week that Voice of America would incorporate content from One America News Network, a pro-Trump television channel that has endorsed falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.
Voice of America, which was founded in 1942, halted operations March 15, a day after Trump signed an executive order seeking to gut the US Agency for Global Media. Its news programming has been partly restored since the April court ruling that stopped the Trump administration from dismantling the agency and other newsrooms it oversees.
The Trump administration has challenged the April ruling, claiming that the lower court had gone too far in halting other firings that took place in March.
In early May, a federal appeals court paused parts of the April lower court order that required the Trump administration to rehire the employees.
The Trump administration did not appeal parts of the April order that mandated the resumption of Voice of America’s news programming. The lower court found that Congress had required the executive branch to keep the network as “a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news”.
The Trump administration has since kept most of Voice of America’s operations shuttered while restoring parts of its service. Its Mandarin and Persian services, for example, were restored. But the news organisation’s English website has stopped updating since March 15.