The Atlantic

09/05/2025

Every day, some 2 billion people around the world use privacy-protection tools supported by the Open Technology Fund. When people in China escape their government’s firewalls and censorship software—now so dense that the system has been called the “locknet”—or when users in Cuba or Myanmar evade cruder internet blocks, they can access material written in their own languages and read stories they would otherwise never see. Both the access and some of the information are available because the U.S. government has for decades backed a constellation of programs—the technology fund, independent foreign-language broadcasters, counterpropaganda campaigns—designed to give people in repressive countries access to evidence-based news.

The information that people in the autocratic world receive from this network is wide ranging, based on reporting, and very different from what they are told by state media in their own country. If they live in Iran, for example, they might have learned from Radio Farda (backed by U.S. funding, broadcast in Persian) that their government did not, as it had claimed, capture an Israeli pilot during June’s bombing campaign, and they might even have heard, in their own language, American explanations of the campaign instead.

If they live in Siberia, they could hear from Radio Liberty (U.S.-backed, staffed by Russian-speaking journalists) precise information about the poor condition of their local roads, including one highway that is 89 miles long but so muddy and full of potholes that traversing it takes 36 hours. If they are Uyghurs living in China, they could have heard, at least before the end of May, reporting in Uyghur from Radio Free Asia (also U.S.-backed, producing reports in nine languages), the broadcaster that originally informed the world about internment camps for members of the persecuted minority.

But for how much longer will this information flow? Right now, all of America’s foreign broadcasters, which also include Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and a handful of others, are in grave danger. At the end of February, President Donald Trump appointed Kari Lake as senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees them. Lake is an ideologue and former local-TV anchor who failed to be elected governor of Arizona, and then failed to be elected as a senator from Arizona.

With no experience in international broadcasting or foreign policy, she put the entire staff of VOA on administrative leave and announced plans to cut the funding of all of the organizations under the USAGM umbrella; she did so with venomous relish, hypocritically accusing chronically underfunded broadcasters of wastefulness, tarring journalists as foreign agents. She began firing contract employees, in some cases giving visa holders who had worked for years on behalf of the U.S. government 30 days to leave the country.

From the American point of view, foreign broadcasters and organizations that fight foreign propaganda are a bargain. They cost very little in comparison with the billions we spend on defense. They have the potential to produce huge benefits. So why cut them?

In the absence of logical explanations, alternate theories abound. Some believe there is a plan to privatize VOA. Others think the explanation is simpler. Some MAGA acolytes, including Russell Vought of OMB, simply don’t believe that the U.S. should have any kind of soft power. Others like and admire Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime. In December 2021, for example, Darren Beattie posted on X that “Nato is a much greater threat to American liberty than Putin ever was.” Perhaps Beattie, Lake, and Benz simply share the same deep dislike of independent journalists as Hu Xijin and Margarita Simonyan, and feel the same enthusiasm for destroying them.

The Trump administration has temporarily given this clique power. But even now, it is important to remember that they don’t represent the majority of Americans, nor do they represent a majority in Congress. In the coming months, the House and the Senate can, with a little effort and just the barest hint of bravery, resist this unilateral disarmament and put America back at the center of the fight against authoritarian propaganda. Instead of allowing the Chinese and Russians to gain ground, Congress can both restore funding and push back against the administration’s budgetary games, the rescissions that could restrict Congress’s ability to legislate about this, or anything else, in the future.

They can also back the people and the programs that legislators, including Republicans in both chambers, have long said they believe in. As Judge Lamberth wrote, when ruling on the case of RFE/RL, “Congress has found that ‘it is the policy of the United States to promote the right of freedom of opinion and expression’ and that ‘open communication of information and ideas among the peoples of the world contributes to international peace and stability.” Following its own logic, Congress can rededicate America to the real fight, against real censorship, once again.