Trump's VOA Shutdown Was No Accident -- It Was Project 2025 in Action

In early March, federal District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruled that President Donald Trump's effort to dismantle Voice of America and the U.S. Agency for Global Media was illegal. The judge ordered USAGM to reinstate most of its employees, who had been placed on paid leave after Trump pulled the plug on the taxpayer-funded international broadcasting network.

The administration tried to frame the shutdown as a cost-cutting measure driven by Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency. That's a lie. The real story is in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for authoritarian governance that Trump claimed he knew nothing about. USAGM was on the hit list long before DOGE became a convenient scapegoat.

What We Lost When VOA Went Dark

Before Trump decapitated it, USAGM was broadcasting in 64 languages to 427 million listeners, viewers, and internet users every week across 100 countries. For people living under authoritarian regimes -- like the Islamic population of Uzbekistan, a former Soviet state where Radio Azattyk provided a lifeline of reliable news -- these broadcasts were often the only source of factual information available.

VOA also did something almost no mainstream U.S. outlet bothers with anymore: climate coverage. On March 10, 2025, VOA reported that the U.S. had pulled out of the United Nations' climate loss and damage fund. Few other news organizations covered that story. Days later, VOA went silent.

The Propaganda Question

Critics will ask: Isn't VOA just government propaganda? The answer is complicated. During World War I and II, U.S. government broadcasting was explicitly propagandistic. The Smith-Mundt Act, which established VOA, once forbade disseminating its material inside the U.S. -- apparently to protect Americans from their own government's spin.

But contemporary VOA, before Trump killed it, mostly stuck to straight reporting. In a media landscape where Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News traffic in lies, and where even The Washington Post's editorial page has become unrecognizable, VOA was doing something increasingly rare: publishing facts without partisan spin.

That doesn't mean it was perfect. But compare it to the propaganda Trump himself pumps out daily. During his first term, Washington Post fact-checkers counted 30,573 lies. They've since given up trying to track them all.

Who Benefits From Silence?

So why shut down an agency that broadcasts American values like freedom and democracy to the world? The answer becomes clearer when you consider who benefits: authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin, Trump's patron saint, who would prefer that people in places like Uzbekistan not have access to factual news.

Project 2025 explicitly called for dismantling USAGM. Trump followed through with a March 2025 executive order. The administration installed Kari Lake, a former broadcaster and election denier, to oversee the destruction. Judge Lamberth ruled that Lake had taken over USAGM unlawfully, making her layoffs of roughly 1,000 employees null and void.

What Happens Next?

Judge Lamberth's ruling requires USAGM to resume operations. But the next chapter is unwritten. Will Trump appeal? Will he comply but turn VOA into a pro-Trump publicity machine? Will he encourage it to publish convenient lies, attack his enemies, or simply ignore stories that make him look bad?

The Cold War premise behind VOA was simple: Soviet media broadcast lies, and the U.S. countered with truth. Today, the dynamic has flipped. You can't get through a White House press briefing without several lies. You can't get through a Trump speech without dozens.

Trump has called press freedom "frankly disgusting." He now owns his own billion-dollar media company to publish whatever he wants. The question is whether he'll allow USAGM to operate as a factual news service -- or whether he'll complete what Project 2025 started and turn it into another propaganda arm of his administration.

For now, the judge has forced the lights back on. Whether they stay on, and what they illuminate, remains to be seen.