Lawfare Archive: Tom Kent on the Dismantling of American Government Broadcasting

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I'm Marissa Wong, intern at Lawfare, with an episode from the Lawfare Archive for March 29th, 2006. On March 7th, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that Kari Lake's appointment to run the U.S. agency for global media, which oversees international broadcaster, Voice of America, was unlawful. And that Lake's actions in that role, including the firing of thousands of employees, were illegitimate. As of the week of March 23rd, Voice of America employees are now returning to their jobs, a year after their unlawful firings. For today's archive, I chose an episode from March 25, 2025, in which Thomas Kent joined Benjamin Netanyahu Wittes to discuss President Trump's executive order attempting to dismantle Voice of America in Radio Free Europe. It's the Lawfare podcast. I'm Benjamin Netanyahu Wittes, editor-in-chief of Lawfare with Tom Kent, former head of Radio Free Europe. If the U.S. government comes up with some alternative way to address the world's people in a way that is credible and not just a blast of propaganda that turns listeners off, then, you know, I suppose there's some future to the whole concept of international communication. Today we're talking about the administration's executive order dismantling USAGM, the parent company of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and a bunch of other U.S. information broadcasters. All right, so let's start with your history with Voice of America and its related organizations. How did you come to be involved in it? And what was your role? Well, I had a long history in Russian affairs. That was my specialty at university. And then I joined the Associated Press and worked in a number of overseas assignments, including as Moscow bureau chief. Then I came back from Moscow to become head of international news at AP and ethics editor of the AP and remained sort of the AP's Russianist going back to Russia constantly through the end of the Soviet Union, the Gorbachev period. and a little, little bit into the Yeltsin period. And when I left the Associated Press in 2016, I became president and CEO of Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, which focuses heavily on the former Soviet Union countries, although its coverage area includes Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, East Europe. And I was there until about the middle of 2018. And after that, I came back to the U.S. I teach now at Columbia University about the World Information War. I write books about it, and I consult the governments, militaries, NGOs, on Russian affairs and questions of propaganda and disinformation.

All right. So for those who do not understand the borderlines between all of these organizations, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio Marti in Cuba, Sarwa, I mean, there's a whole bunch of different U.S. government-backed, or at least there were until last weekend, government-backed. news slash counterpropaganda organizations. And they are all, I think, under the auspices of an organization called USAGM. So explain to us a little bit about what these different organizations are and why they're separate and why they are historically grouped under this umbrella organization. Well, there's been all sorts of adjusting and readjusting and resorting in these organizations over time. But at the moment, they are indeed all under the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which is USAGM. And they're all a little bit different in different ways. The Voice of America and Radio Marti, which is the branch of USAGM that broadcasts to Cuba, are government agencies. So their employees are civil servants. They have all civil service protection. They are government employees. Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks are what they call grantees. They receive a grant from the government to operate. They're organized as private companies. Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, for example, which is two organizations that were welded into one, so it has that kind of awkward name now, is a private corporation based in Delaware. and receives a grant from the U.S. Agency for Global Media. It comes originally through Congress, and Congress designates a certain amount of the money that it gives USAGM for Radio for Europe Radio Liberty, and that's how we get our funding. At the highest level of altitude, What happened last week, last weekend, with respect to this, I mean, if you read the executive order, what it says is USAGM shall be reduced to the statutory minimum required of it. So what did that mean for Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Voice of America? I mean, how shut down are they at this point? Well, ultimately the courts are going to decide. It depends how much money each of the grantee organizations, Radio Free Europe, Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, have in their cash drawer left. Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty is still operating a good deal. We have a little bit of cash, but we're talking about a month or two. And the courts will decide what exactly... statutory requirements mean. To me, it would seem that if Congress appropriates money for Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty, then there's a statutory requirement for the U.S. Agency for Global Media to disperse that money. But, you know, it's terribly complicated, all of it legally, and we'll see.

But just to be clear, for the side of it that is actually U.S. government agencies, which is to say Voice of America and Radio Marti, they just fired everybody, right? Well, they put them on administrative leave. I think there are some people who are still there. And sometimes one can see a little flicker of action on the website or some transmitter still on the air. But it's obviously been kneecapped tremendously. Yeah. And they were put on administrative leave initially, but then a whole bunch of them got termination notices as to their contracts. And I think that's... Obviously, it'll be a matter of litigation, whether those are valid. But I think we have to assume that there's a certain, you know, a measure of finality if the government really doesn't want to run a news organization, it's pretty hard to force it to. Right. And you lose all these people who obviously, I think a lot of them already had their resumes out because of all the hostile things that were said about U.S. international broadcasting before. before this last action. So you're going to lose people with a lot of language and other expertise who will just go elsewhere, even if the government eventually decides that wants to rehire them. All right, so let's talk about these organizations and their actual role in the media ecosystem. So for most Americans, these organizations are completely invisible because they don't actually serve an American audience. That's not what they're for. Let's talk first about their historic importance, because that seems to be completely uncontroversial. What was their role prior to the fall of the Soviet Union? And then we'll talk about the more contemporary role in a moment. But talk to us about where these organizations came from and what was the historic role that they served. They were created at different times. The first one was the Voice of America, which is created during World War II, broadcasting first in German to Germany. And then after the war, we had Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty, and the others followed after that. During the Cold War, Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty was extremely active and effective in penetrating the communist bloc. It was about the only way that people in Soviet occupied East Europe and in... in the Soviet Union itself could get outside information. Let me cut you off there for a second. How do we know it was effective? I mean, it's easy for us to sit here and say, hey, Voice of America played a really important role. Radio Free Europe played a really important role during the Cold War. But what's the actual evidence that it did?

well i think what you have to do is look in the mirror and look at the soviet reaction to what these broadcasters were doing it was little short of hysterical Every day or two in Pravda, there would be some cartoon denouncing Radio for Europe or Radio Liberty. And the same thing happened in other countries that these broadcasters targeted. They were very much hated by the government, which obviously felt a need to attack them. And, you know, I would trust the Soviet government to know that its people were listening and that it was worth being such a big deal out of it. Otherwise, they would have ignored it. There were Russians who were going out to their dachas on weekends, covering their radios with aluminum foil, twisting them in all directions to try to find some way to hear our broadcast through the Soviet jamming. The Soviets we estimated spent a lot more on jamming our broadcasts than we spent on creating them. So obviously they saw it as a mortal threat. There were important events in Soviet history that people principally learned about from these services. I'm thinking about Chernobyl, all kinds of stuff related to Czechoslovakia in the late 60s. And if you hear, like, Lindsey Graham, talk about... this executive order, he'll say, yeah, it played an important role in the Cold War, but, you know, not, I don't know what it's been up to since the end of the, since the Berlin Wall came down. My impression is that there are still a lot of people who get their news from Voice of America, from Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, etc. What is the current function as you understand it? Currently, it's what it was before. It broadcasts news for people who can't get. legitimate news through other channels. So we see USAGM's networks completely active in all these places. The big difference is that a lot of people still think that we basically do radio. And there is still some radio because in some parts of the world, that's a way to get through. But the USAGM networks are very active in web, social networks, satellite broadcasting, television, Radio for Europe, Radio Liberty.

has a 24-hour Russian language TV news channel. So they use all the latest technology, including an awful lot of technology to break through blockages, which the Russians and others now try to put on our web services. Right. So. Let's talk about that, because it seems to me that this is, and I kind of mockingly argued this in a column, that if you're trying to build a foreign policy based on lies, It's actually not an obvious thing that you should want to have a first-rate set of newsrooms that operate in multiple different languages. I mean, VOA alone is 49 or 50 languages or something that actually gives people high-quality information, that this is at some level a pretty logical... follow on to a policy that adopts a lot of Russian disinformation as true. And when I wrote that, I was trying to be provocative, but I actually think it's right that if you're spouting Russian propaganda from the Oval Office in meetings with the Ukrainian president, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to also employ you know, 100 Russian-speaking journalists and 40 Ukrainian-speaking journalists whose job is going to be to correct you. And so I'm curious, you know, your sadness and anger over the destruction of these organizations aside, are you surprised by it? The administration and voices close to it have had a lot of problems with U.S. international broadcasting for forever. In the first Trump term, there was a Trump appointed leader of USAGM by the name of Michael Pack, who sat out to reform it, as he put it. And a lot of people felt that his goal was essentially to get into the editorial function and make it go in a certain way. But, you know, whoever's in the Oval Office. it seems to me, should see some value in U.S. international broadcasting for one purpose or another. For example, we at the moment on the past few days have been bombing Yemen. Well, for the people in Yemen, you would think that you would want to have some way to communicate to them why the U.S. is bombing their country to explain that it's because of the Houthis who are firing missiles at ships and that maybe if... they could get the hootis not to fire missiles and ships it would be a good thing so whatever you're trying to do whatever you're trying to convey the fact that you have got an entire structure

People are impressed by USAGM covering in-depth what the U.S. has to say. And in conducting then, as the VOA Charter says, reasonable discussion thereof. So they get the sense from listening to our broadcast or reading our websites that they're getting something with different points of view that will lead to them actually having conversations and maybe. leading them to expect from their own media some kind of balance coverage. I'll give you an example during the State of the Union broadcast by President Trump. The Voice of America broadcast that worldwide, live, in languages including Russian, Ukrainian, Persian, and so forth. There was no way that people in these countries and with these languages and other languages too would have gotten such an immediate, such thorough coverage of what Trump had to say. Yes, after that, VOA broadcast the Democratic response. But the message to these people is that the United States is a country where there are different points of view where you don't go to jail for disagreeing with the president. And maybe it would trigger some people to think that, well, this wouldn't be such a bad idea in our country either. Ground News, in addition to being the sponsor of this episode of the Lawfare podcast, is an app that lets you jump out of your media bubbles and see the blind spots that exist in whatever media ecosystem you operate. Ground News doesn't just show you what the news is. It shows you who's reporting the news, how many news sources are covering it, and how coverage is distributed across the political spectrum. For example, ground news shows that there are 50 different sources reporting that Oman warned allies that ships going through the straits of Hormuz might have to pay a fee. And the headlines are quite different depending on where you look. From right-leaning news sources, you get headlines like ships face voluntary charges under plan for post-war Hormuz. From more left-leaning outlets, you get headlines like Oman tells allies, ships going through Hormuz may have to pay. And further, Brown News shows that only 19% of the news organizations covering the story are left-leaning. 69% of the news sources covering it are conservative. You're much less likely to have encountered that story if you primarily read left-leaning outlets. Brown News helps you jump out of your media bubbles and get closer to the ground truth. It's not a publisher. And it's much more than an aggregator. It's a combination of a rating system and a focused look at who is reporting what. Like Lawfare, Brown News is about bringing you high quality information that you figure out what to do with.

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What do you take to be the administration's beef with VOA? I mean, I've posed a very cynical reason for... their action, they've actually articulated a different one, which is that VOA is full of leftist propaganda, which I don't take to be remotely accurate. But I'm curious, you know, you point out that in the first administration, you know, there was a... attempt to radically reform USAGM in a more Trumpy direction. What do you understand the motivation and rationale here to be? Well, there are a few things. To begin with, USAGM, like any government agency, obviously could be more efficient. People question, why do we need all these different networks? Don't they all do the same thing? Actually, there's an answer that we can come to if you want as to why we need these different networks. But on the surface, it looks like duplication. It's an agency that... Could be more efficient in many ways, as I say. It's headquarters in Washington. VOA headquarters is this huge old rat-infested building, literally. There's a lot that could be cleaned up, literally and figuratively at USAGM. All that said, I don't think that that's primarily what the government is concerned with because any kind of cleaning up or reorganization can be cleaned up and reorganized. It doesn't require getting rid of the organization. I think... What's operating here is that for some years, there's been a group of people who have thought that USAGM was left wing. I don't think it is from having followed it very carefully, but they have collected over a decade or so some examples of unfortunate comments on the air, unfortunate posts by individual. journalists. I'm sure that if you if you went to cherry pick any news organization, maybe even law fair, you could find something, you know, in the past X years that maybe you wish you'd done differently or someone went a little too far. So they have sort of created a list of these of these incidents, which probably number fewer than 20. over the past decade and have managed to convince a number of conservatives. You can see this reflected in the in the 2025 project and elsewhere, that this organization is full of some kind of raging leftists.

If you think that the organization is full of raging leftist journalists and you love the idea of sticking it to leftist journalists, then the opportunity to fire thousands of leftist journalists seems like a great idea, even if you're cutting off your own ability to speak to the world. Yeah, I mean, one way to think about it is that the administration... has an ongoing war on the bureaucracy, it hates the press, and it has various initiatives that are directed at. you know, sort of contempt for foreigners. And this brings all three together, right? It's a war on an American bureaucracy composed of journalists that speaks to foreign countries in foreign languages. All right. So, you know, those of us who have been arguing that this is a real gift to our strategic information competitors, specifically to the Russians, but also the Chinese, What is the, you're a longtime Russia watcher, among other things. What has been the reaction to this in Moscow? The Russian government at its highest level officially is being very diplomatic and saying, well, this is an internal affair for the United States. But Russian commentators on television and elsewhere, of course, are turning cartwheels. This is something that the Russian authorities have spent endless amounts of time and money trying to block out to their audiences. So they won't have that problem anymore, assuming that these broadcasts do end. and these web services do end. There are all sorts of pro-Russian groups in East Europe that feel the same way. Regimes like that in Hungary feel the same way. The Iranian Ayatollahs will be pleased because USAGM provided multiple services to Iran that, for example, when they had demonstrations in Iran year or so ago, some big anti-government demonstrations, Iranians knew about these demonstrations in great part because of USAGM broadcasting that let people in one town know it was happening in another. So these are the kinds of people and the kinds of forces that will celebrate this. And certainly throughout the Middle East, all the anti-American contingents there. And in Africa, where Russia and China have sharply stepped up their information operations, they will increasingly be able to control the information space. And sometimes they will even literally take over. There have been cases, for example, when the BBC stopped its broadcasting to the Middle East in some languages, the Chinese radio.

took over those very same frequencies. So when people turned on the frequency or they heard the BBC, they would then hear Chinese broadcasting. So what are the prospects, if any, for a reversal of this decision? You mentioned that there's a possibility of litigation. There's also traditionally serious constituencies for these programs in Congress, and they're not just Democrats, right? programming instruments, actually a lot of them have their origins in conservative politics, the fact that we shouldn't cede information space to the Soviets or to the Chinese or to the Iranians. I mean, for VOA appears to be really shut down at this point. Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty are because they're private organizations and as you say, there's some money in the bank. moving along, but they're going to have to find alternative funding sources real fast to stay alive. So my question is, what's the prospect either for Congress to get involved in a constructive way, for the courts to get involved in a constructive way, or for the executive branch to realize that they've really cut off their nose to spite their face here and sort of save some of these organizations or some portions of these organizations? You're right that traditionally Congress has had a real bipartisan support for these broadcasters. And they were coming from different sides. When I would go to meet with Congress as president of RFERL, and we had to go and explain to them what we were doing and justify our budget, some people in Congress would say to me, you know, what we like about you is you broadcast the truth and all sides of, you know, fair and objective. And, you know, that's really great. And that's why we support you. Other people would say, we hope you're giving Vladimir Putin a taste of his own medicine. implying that they thought that we should go off and do disinformation or anything else to advance America's goals. So whatever you wanted, however you imagined in your mind, USAGM networks to be, there was a strong support. What there will be now is, you know, obviously going to be a function not only what people think about RFERL and the other networks, but, you know, the American, the overall relationship between the Congress and the president, which is. which is subject to many other factors. The courts will see they can demand that USAGM hand this money over to the grantee agencies, but USAGM has many ways, since it administers the funds and does accounting and so forth, as many ways it could probably make life miserable for the grantee networks in any case. There's been talk of the EU. I was just in an EU conference in Brussels a couple days ago, and there's talk of the EU picking up some of the funding for RFERL, and that could happen. But there's a larger question too. And here, you know, maybe we could say something positive.

potentially about the administration. And that is that maybe it considers that USAGM is a rotten old husk and it's, you know, can think what it wants. But the question then is, so what? So what do you want to do? I think that. the administration ought to realize that there is a value to being able to address foreign populations, whatever the hell we want to tell them. And so there could be some kind of other structure, something potentially more related to the State Department, which is what Project 2025 referred to, or to the National Security Council or whatever. I don't think that... The US AGM structure as it exists now is necessarily the only way in the cosmos that this kind of international communication can take place. I think it would have been wise to leave it there while they were figuring out something else. But we are where we are. And if the US government comes up with some alternative way to address the world's people in a way that... is credible and not just a blast of propaganda that turns listeners off, then, you know, I suppose there's some future to the whole concept of international communication. So that's super optimistic of you, and I love that. But I want to ask, is there any evidence that that's what they're thinking? I don't know. I mean, you can always go back to Project 2025. And some of those things are carried out and some of them are not. But there seems to be a recognition among the kinds of people who did that, that we do need to have that communication. It seems to me that if I were the State Department or I were the National Security Council or I were the Department of Defense, which also has a... a potent communications capability, that I would want some way to get messages out fast to people. If only because, you know, if we're going to... If we're going to wind up intervening in some country or another, you know, to free an American or attack terrorists or whatever, it helps a whole lot if the local population knows something about the United States, feels some sympathy for the U.S. understands why the U.S. acts as it does. It's a huge force multiplier if you want to look at it just in very crudely strategic terms. And the incremental cost. of having these kinds of broadcasters that can, to use the military terminology, shape the battlefield to affect hearts and minds where U.S. forces may be engaged, where U.S. business may be engaged, where U.S. citizens may be in peril. It sounds of some value. If you take something like the, I referred earlier to the Swahili and Lingala services of Voice of America.

You know, those services cost $1 million or $2 million. An Apache attack helicopter costs $52 million. So you would hope that when it comes to the point and it will at some point, somewhere, that those Apache helicopters have to set down, you would hope that the population there would not be totally under the sway of hostile anti-American propaganda from our adversaries. Right. So what is the total cost per annum of USAGM? I know VOA is something like $230, $240 million, but what's the rest of USAGM together? You put it all together and it's around $800 million. So again, less than a single one of these highly bespoke weapon systems iterated once. Yeah, yeah. You know, it all depends on how you want to view it. I mean, I obviously come from a journalism background. I believe in free press. I believe in democracy. I believe in human rights. I believe in modeling responsible journalism because I think that countries that are democracies are less likely to attack each other and create the kinds of wars that the United States seems always to get dragged into. So I think there's a lot to be said for democratic countries. But even if I were... you know, just sitting there on the Pentagon with, you know, a hundred medals on my chest thinking about, you know, how are we going to obtain our military objective? I would want to have a capability to have people around the world on our side. So I want to tell you a personal story about VOA offices, different language services, and then just get your response to it. So as you may know, in one of my non-lawfare lives, I do a series of protests at the Russian embassy where I use projectors and lasers to put symbols of Ukraine. as well as various obnoxious slogans on the face of the embassy. And the Russians really don't like this. But both at different times, both the Ukrainian language service and the Russian language service of VOA have covered it. And they've covered it in very different ways. So the Ukrainian language service covered it in quite a bit of depth as part of... a long story about the Russian embassy neighborhood and how they have rallied the block across the street from the embassy has really rallied in favor of Ukraine. And it was kind of like a human interest story about American neighbors of the Russian embassy rallying to Ukraine. It was... received a lot of the tension in Ukraine and not the projections in particular, but the idea that this neighborhood was kind of rallying to Ukraine. The Russian language service covered it in a different way, which was that I, when Ambassador Antonoff, the last Russian ambassador left, I projected a farewell message to him.

Russian language service covered that, which I thought was really interesting. They kind of broadcast into Russia that some American guy was taunting the Russian ambassador on his way out. And so I think it's an interesting micro picture of your point that VOA and these other AGM services give the United States the ability to talk in fairly micro-targeted ways to individual communities, some of which are language-based, some of which are regionally based, about things that maybe the American population doesn't care that much about. So I'm just interested for any thoughts that that example brings up for you. Sure. One thing that comes to mind is that, you know, what is a Russian to think when he sees a broadcast about how you're projecting images onto the Russian embassy? Now, some Russians will think, oh, these are horrible Americans doing all this anti-Russia propaganda. But at another level, I think the thing that sinks in is that an individual American, you know, this Ben Wittis, whoever he is, has the right to do this. He's not arrested. I mean, he can go and operate from a window across the street or the sidewalk or whatever you do. And this is like freedom of speech and this can happen. I mean, I think that is the, you know, the amazing thing. And so a lot of the VOA's coverage of the United States, which on its surface might look. might look one way, can have a different effect. For example, the VOA covered the George Floyd protests in the United States. And if you were, you know, an American propagandist, you might say, well, oh, this is terrible, the VOA shouldn't cover George Floyd demonstrations because it makes America police look bad. But the fact that people could demonstrate against the police in the United States was just stunning for listeners in so many countries. And that is really the message. And it makes people think that, gee, you know, despite everything we hear, you know, the Americans have got something there that I think rebounds to our benefit. So I want to ask you to look forward over the next few months. describe what a what a positive scenario for the next few months in this area looks like and what a negative I mean I suppose a negative scenario is that these organizations wither and die or become simple propaganda outlets if we're inclined toward optimism what should we be looking for to happen over the next few weeks and months If we're inclined toward optimism, we would look for indications that the State Department or the NSC or somebody is going to get back into the international communication business. That could be through broadcasting, which I think is absolutely essential and web services, all the things that that USAGM does now, perhaps in a different structure. And also things like international exchange programs and educational programs and things that

have such a huge impact when you go abroad people are always saying you know important people are always saying when i was a student i got this this this trip to the u.s through the u.s. state department that paid for it and ever since then you know i've really understood the united states and i'm and i'm a fan so all this international communication is is important i think it's strategically important i think it's militarily important i think it's economically important and i I can't imagine that we would want to leave that completely fallow. In terms of other optimism or pessimism, a huge amount of it in my mind turns around the 10 USAGM journalists who are currently in prison in places like Vietnam, Iran, Belarus, Russia. And I'm just horrified at the thought that the U.S. government will just sort of let them rot, that, you know, they'll take away the organizations that they worked for and that the U.S. embassies in these countries, you know, sensing the hostility toward these organizations by the administration will do nothing. I mean, this administration has been pretty good at getting out of jail a number of Americans and people who are close to U.S. interests in various ways. So my... My greatest hope is that these people will not be forgotten. Thomas Kent teaches at Columbia University. He is the author of Striking Back, Overt and Covert Options to Combat Russian Disinformation and How Russia Loses. And of course, he was the president of Radio Free Europe slash Radio Liberty prior to 2018. Tom, thanks so much for joining us today. Thanks so much.

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