Project 2025 Tracker / What’s done, what’s next

6. Department of State · Notable · Needs Congress

Restore and consolidate U.S. international broadcasting infrastructure

Not started

195 6. Department of State

“The United States must reassert its public diplomacy obligations by restoring its international broadcasting infrastructure as part of the broader U.S. foreign policy framework, consolidating broadcasting resources and recommitting to people-focused and pro-freedom messaging and content.”

What has happened

  1. Not started

    Congress re-enacted the existing structure rather than consolidating it: P.L. 119-75 funds USAGM as a related agency of the Department of State with $643,000,000 for international broadcasting operations and $9,700,000 for capital improvements, reporting through its own Chief Executive Officer to the Appropriations Committees. Requires-Congress ask, and no consolidating statute exists. Nothing in the window restores broadcasting infrastructure, consolidates broadcasting resources or recommits the broadcasters to people-focused, pro-freedom content: the three limbs of this Quote are each unmet.

  2. Not started

    The record runs against the ask. EO 14238 ordered the U.S. Agency for Global Media reduced to its statutory minimum; USAGM's own compliance release of 2025-03-15 placed its staff on administrative leave and Voice of America went off the air. Nothing in the window restores broadcasting infrastructure or consolidates broadcasting resources.

Research log

What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence

Research notes

Every source this Status rests on is allowlisted and was read in full; none of it was off the allowlist or unreadable.

  • Kept separate from the Chapter 8 USAGM asks (settled on review, 2026-09-01). This item shares a record with #636, #637 and #628 — EO 14238, the March 2025 shutdown, P.L. 119-75 — and was tested against all three for whether they are one ask. It is a different ask, so all four stand. The test is whether a single instrument would satisfy them at once, and none would: a statute consolidating USAGM’s subparts under the NSC or State (#636) leaves broadcasting infrastructure unrestored and says nothing about content; defunding and disestablishing USAGM (#637) is the opposite of restoring the infrastructure; putting VOA in the NSC chain of command (#628) moves one broadcaster’s supervision, not the “broadcasting resources” this Quote asks to be consolidated. A shared instrument is not a shared ask.
  • The litigation over the March 2025 shutdown — the D.D.C. injunctions, the 2026-03-17 judgment that the shutdown unlawfully withheld statutorily required broadcasting, and the D.C. Circuit’s partial stays — is tracked under #637. It does not move this Status: a court order restraining a shutdown is not this administration restoring the infrastructure (a Status measures what this administration did), and the restoration the court ordered has not been shown to have happened.
Action
restore
Object
U.S. international broadcasting infrastructure
ID
525