Authoritarian leaders no longer need to silence independent media. The US just did it for them.
For the first time since it began broadcasting in 1942, the Voice of America (VOA) has gone off the air, muzzled by the government that it served. Last month, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order dismantling the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA.
Citing the order and resulting budget cuts, the agency terminated all grants for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty — funding for which was later restored following a federal judge’s temporary ruling — and Radio Free Asia, shuttering independent news sources across eastern Europe, Russia, China, North Korea and Central Asia.
Illustration: Yusha
For millions of people living under oppressive regimes that tightly control local media, VOA and its affiliates had long served as a lifeline, delivering news uncorrupted by state propaganda.
That was certainly true in the Soviet Union and Iran after the Islamic Revolution, where people huddled around transistor radios to access a source of information beyond the regime’s control.
The shutdown is not an isolated act of budget cutting. It is part of the Trump administration’s broader campaign to dismantle the infrastructure of US democracy-promotion efforts at home and abroad.
Another target is the US Agency for International Development (USAID), founded by former US president John F. Kennedy in 1961 not just to supply humanitarian aid, but to support democracy by bolstering civil society, fostering independent media and training activists.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who leads Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, accelerated the assault on government agencies, using his social-media platform X to denounce them as corrupt and mismanaged. He went so far as to disparage USAID on his social media platform, calling it as “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists.”
Trump’s defenders frame the dismantling of the agencies as simply trimming unnecessary expenses — a cost-saving measure of little political consequence. However, the cuts were never about fiscal responsibility. They were about silencing institutions that challenge authoritarian power structures globally.
US Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at this year’s Munich Security Conference can be read as a declaration of war on democracy-promotion efforts. Vance berated European leaders, claiming that their greatest threat was not Russia or China, but their own governments’ restrictions on anti-democratic voices.
In a reversal of the US’ longstanding position, he dismissed Russian election interference and criticized measures to curb disinformation.
Despite the Trump administration’s attacks, the real-world impact of USAID and VOA has been profound and measurable. USAID’s democracy programs have exposed corruption, defended human rights and strengthened independent media in countries where free speech is under threat.
In Serbia, USAID-supported outlets such as the Crime and Corruption Reporting Network, known as KRIK, while the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network exposed financial malfeasance that triggered political resignations and legal actions against government officials.
Perhaps most notably, USAID-funded journalists helped investigate and report on the Panama Papers leak, one of the largest corruption scandals in history.
The revelations of how politicians, business leaders and criminals hide wealth in offshore tax havens, prompted a flurry of resignations, prosecutions and policy changes worldwide.
VOA has been equally important in the fight against censorship.
During the Arab Spring, it launched initiatives such as “Behind the Wall,” a project that allowed citizens in Syria, Yemen, Bahrain and other countries to submit information and footage, facilitating real-time, on-the-ground reporting.
In Hong Kong, democracy demonstrators relied on VOA and Radio Free Asia to counter China’s propaganda. Even in Russia, independent journalists regularly turned to VOA to challenge the Kremlin’s narratives.
Unsurprisingly, authoritarian regimes loathed USAID and VOA, with many accusing them of promoting regime change. In 2012, Russian President Vladimir Putin expelled USAID in an attempt to quash opposition protests.
In 2023, Hungary established the Sovereignty Protection Office to investigate individuals or entities that receive foreign funding — a tool used to crack down on US-supported independent media.
The same regimes are celebrating the Trump administration. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev praised Musk’s “smart move” to shut down USAID, while Balazs Orban, a top adviser to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, wrote that he “couldn’t be happier” about Trump “taking down this corrupt foreign interference machine.”
The Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times proclaimed that the VOA has “now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”
The consequences have been immediate and severe. Last month, Serbian authorities raided civil-society organizations and used disinformation about USAID spending to create a false narrative about foreign efforts to overthrow the government.
Likewise, anti-junta groups in Myanmar can no longer afford to deliver human rights and governance programming to local communities, safe houses for activists have closed, investigations have stopped and efforts to combat human trafficking have ended.
Authoritarian governments are moving quickly to fill the vacuum left by the US withdrawal. China’s media presence has grown rapidly in Africa: The Xinhua news agency now has 37 bureaus across the continent, more than any other international news agency.
StarTimes, a Chinese digital television provider, has installed satellite dishes in thousands of rural African homes, making Chinese government-produced content one of the few available news sources for many audiences.
In Latin America, the Kremlin-backed broadcaster RT en Espanol reaches millions of viewers, spreading falsehoods about US foreign policy and working to discredit democratic processes in countries such as Colombia and Mexico.
China is taking a similar approach in Southeast Asia, providing equipment, training and financial support to government broadcasters in Cambodia and Laos to promote its preferred narratives.
Some might dismiss democracy promotion as just another government program, but without VOA and USAID-backed media and civil-society programs, authoritarian regimes would find it easier to suppress dissent and promote their distorted narratives.
As the US renounces support for democratic advocacy, the enemies of democracy are sharpening their knives.
Heela Rasool-Ayub is director of planetary politics at New America.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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