8. Media Agencies (USAGM, CPB) · Notable
Consolidate redundant USAGM language services across VOA, RFA, and RFE/RL
Printed page 242 8. Media Agencies (USAGM, CPB)
“For example, VOA has a Mandarin-language service but also funds redundant services through Radio Free Asia. VOA also has a Farsi-language service that duplicates one funded through Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Surplus services in the same languages are often unnecessary and counterproductive. Fiscal responsibility and transparency should return to the USAGM, with consolidation being a cornerstone of the strategy.”
What has happened
- Blocked
On the merits the court held USAGM had unlawfully withheld mandatory agency action, finding among other things that VOA cannot operate its Persian service at current staffing ("[c]urrent operation of [the] Persian service with two employees and zero [contractors] is not possible"), and that the agency had put the cart before the horse by effectuating the deletion of language services through staff removals before the consultation with the Secretary of State that 22 U.S.C. 6204(4) requires. Consolidation as the Quote describes it — deliberate, service-by-service, after a study of efficiency — was never attempted.
- Blocked
The district court enjoined the action in three parts, one of which orders USAGM to "restore VOA programming such that USAGM fulfills its statutory mandate that VOA 'serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news'", and another to restore the fiscal year 2025 grants to Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks. An order preventing the deletion of language services has been in force from this date.
- Attempted
USAGM's Statutory Minimum Memorandum deleted language services wholesale rather than consolidating the duplicated ones. VOA ceased all broadcasting activities in March 2025; the agency later restored four services in "a substantially reduced fashion" — Mandarin, Farsi, Pashto and Dari, of which only Pashto and Dari are broadcast by radio — plus digital programming in Russian and Korean. The two duplications the Quote names, VOA Mandarin against Radio Free Asia and VOA Farsi against RFE/RL, were among the services affected.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
- Leveled on the same trail as #637 (blocked), with its own reading: the Quote asks for consolidation of redundant services as a cornerstone of a fiscal strategy, and what happened was an across-the-board shutdown that a court has ordered reversed. blocked records that the administration’s action is stopped, not that consolidation is under way.
- Related and separately researched: #621 (done, spending under $700 million) is the fiscal half of the same page.
- Action
- eliminate
- Object
- Redundant USAGM/grantee language services
- ID
- 622