Voice of America’s parent agency announced on Friday that it had sent termination letters to over 639 additional employees.
This marks the completion of an 85 percent reduction in workers since March, thus signalling the end of a broadcasting network that was established to combat Nazi propaganda.
According to Kari Lake, a senior advisor to the United States Agency for Global Media, the staff reduction included the elimination of 1,400 posts.
“Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America, part of a long-overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy,” Lake stated.
This was done as part of the aim of United States President Donald Trump to reduce the number of employees working at the agency to a statutory minimum.
In her statement, she described the organisation as being “rife with dysfunction, bias, and waste.”
According to Lake, the action meant that USAGM was now operating close to the statutory minimum of 81 personnel to function.
She stated that there will be a total of 250 people remaining across USAGM, Voice of America, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which is responsible for transmitting news into Cuba managed by communists.
Her statement was that none of the 33 people working for OCB had been let go.
The decision most certainly spells the end of the Voice of America (VOA), which was established in 1942 with the purpose of combating Nazi propaganda. VOA covered nearly fifty languages and communicated with 360 million people every week, many of whom were living under totalitarian regimes.
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In May, approximately 600 VOA contractors were terminated from their positions.
The Voice of America (VOA) and other publicly financed media outlets have been accused by some Republicans of being biassed against conservatives, and they have called for the closure of these institutions as part of broader measures to reduce the size of the government.
Radio Free Asia, another USAGM station, which has already been reduced to skeleton personnel, announced on Friday in an email to its staff that it was instituting additional furloughs in its human resources, ordinance, journalist security, and research, training, and evaluation teams. This communication came after the station had already been reduced to skeleton staffing.
The cuts to the USAGM are being challenged in a number of different judicial cases.
