By Anne Applebaum
Friday, September 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.
All of the organizations contend that Lake’s actions are
illegal, and all of them are now engaged in extensive lawsuits, even as they
are already cutting budgets, programs, and journalists. They have won some
initial cases. In March, U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth ordered the administration to keep Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
open, “in keeping with Congress’s longstanding determination” that “the
continued operation of RFE/RL is in the public interest.” Last month, the same
judge, a Ronald Reagan appointee, found that Lake did not actually have the right to fire Michael
Abramowitz, the director of Voice of America. That power belongs to a
bipartisan, Senate-confirmed board—whose members Trump removed in January.
Congress, not Lake, also has the legal right to decide whether or not to fund
the broadcasters and can decide to do so, overriding the president and his
Office of Management and Budget, which pushed hard to eliminate the outlets.
Indeed, the House Appropriations Committee has already put funding for foreign broadcasting
in next year’s budget—although of course the administration is challenging
Congress’s power of the purse as well.
Even if they remain open, all of the foreign broadcasters
will remain in peril under an administration that is bent on destroying them,
and they know it. When reporting this article, I interviewed multiple people
who asked not to be quoted: Nobody wants to say or do anything that will make
the situation worse. These are mission-driven people who have gone to work
every day in the belief that they are promoting America, as well as a set of
American ideals—free speech, the rule of law, democracy.
They have long had bipartisan support. Since the creation
of Radio Free Europe in 1950, Democrats, Republicans, senators,
representatives, and every president from Harry Truman to Joe Biden all
believed in the importance of helping people in closed societies gain access to
evidence-based information, and not just for their own sake. Better-informed
Russians or Iranians would be less likely to go to war with us, less likely to
invade other countries, more likely to resist the whims of their dictators. Even
Donald Trump in his first term as president—despite the best
efforts of some of his appointees—continued to support
independent foreign media, anti-censorship technology, and assistance for
activists who fight censorship all over the world.
But that era is over. Without openly saying so, the
United States is reorienting its foreign policy to protect governments that
manipulate and censor information, both inside their own countries and around
the world. Our own national security could suffer.
***
“Promoting censorship” is not how the administration
describes its foreign policy, of course. In a speech in Riyadh earlier this
year, Trump promised Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern monarchies that
America would stop “giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your
own affairs.” That made it sound like the administration would be somehow
neutral.
But in a world of intense ideological competition, there
is no such thing as neutrality. Since Trump’s election, China has not stopped
spending billions of dollars broadcasting autocratic propaganda, buying space
on television networks around the world, and training international
journalists. Russia has not stopped using social media and deceptive websites
to weaken and divide the U.S. and Europe, to prop up dictatorships in Africa,
or to lie about the war in Ukraine.
Everywhere American voices disappear, other powers will
fill the gap. An extensive Wall Street Journal investigation found that in Thailand, for example, a regular VOA slot on the
Thai state broadcaster has already been replaced by a Chinese outlet. An
Indonesian news channel that hosts a weekly program for the country’s Chinese
diaspora no longer features reports in Mandarin from VOA after the cuts; it has
replaced them with China’s state-run television too. The Journal found
that China is rushing to expand media services in Africa, and cited in
particular Ethiopia and Nigeria; a former USAGM employee told me that this was
happening just as U.S. broadcasters were planning to expand in Ethiopia. RFA’s
Cantonese-language service went off the air July 1, on the anniversary of the
handover of Hong Kong from the U.K. to China.
The losses from cuts to RFE/RL inside Russia will be just
as great. Already, cuts to the outlet forced Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian
investigative unit, to halt some of its work on corruption and organized crime,
especially bad timing at a moment when this kind of information could help
democratic governments track down companies that are evading sanctions.
Programs exposing covert influence campaigns, counting war deaths, and producing
material in minority languages aimed at Tatarstan,
Bashkiria, and the North Caucasus have already been reduced or suspended.
Russian state media will control the airwaves in all of those places instead.
In Iran, the impact could be even more acute. A few days
after the Israeli and American bombing raids in Iran, I spoke with Saeid
Golkar, a U.S.-based political scientist who follows Iranian social media. He
told me Iranians were hearing from the regime that “we won this war; Israel has
been defeated.” Those who don’t have access to alternative media were being
bombarded with the same narrative: We are winning. At one point the
Trump administration, belatedly realizing that it had a problem with messaging
in Iran, scrambled
to find recently sidelined Farsi-speaking VOA
journalists and asked them to come back to work.
***
Americans have never supported foreign autocrats who hide
information from citizens, nor did Trump’s electorate vote for censorship. On
the contrary, Trump’s MAGA movement has repeatedly portrayed itself as the victim
of censorship, sometimes conjuring up fake statistics or stories to prove
it. (One famous example: that “22 million tweets” were suppressed by the Biden
administration during the 2020 presidential campaign, which would have been
shocking had it actually happened). Yet now that they are in place, MAGA
policies amount to unilateral disarmament in the ongoing narrative war between
the autocratic and democratic worlds..
Consider the fate of the Global Engagement Center, a
small State Department office, also the product
of a bipartisan
effort and initially designed, well before the 2016
election, as a response to online terrorist and extremist campaigns. For the
past several years, the GEC dedicated itself to identifying and revealing
covert Russian and Chinese propaganda, most recently in Africa and Latin
America. The GEC never played any role inside the United States and never
aspired to do so. Nevertheless, the organization became the focus of a series
of far-right conspiracy theories, amplified on X, which dishonestly described
the GEC as an institution promoting “censorship.”
Late last year, congressional Republicans refused
to renew its funding. When announcing the organization’s final closure, the
State Department declared that the GEC “spent millions of dollars to actively
silence and censor the voices of Americans”—a statement that not only provided
no evidence but also represented an extraordinary example of the department
smearing its own employees. On Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast, Darren Beattie, the
acting under secretary of state for public diplomacy and the person who shaped
this policy, boasted about how he had killed off the GEC, a “censorship
operation within the State Department.”
In truth, the only real beneficiaries of the GEC’s
closure were the foreign dictators conducting covert propaganda campaigns. In
the weeks before the organization ceased operations, employees were preparing
an exposure of a Chinese information operation in Europe and other regions.
Three people familiar with this plan, who requested anonymity to avoid
jeopardizing current and former colleagues at the State Department, told me
that it was presented to Beattie, who stopped work on the exposure. “Far from spiking
a single plan, we were proud to spike the entire GEC,” Beattie said in a
statement today. “Indeed, not only was GEC’s infamous censorship activity
profoundly misaligned with this Administration’s pro-free speech position, it
was woefully and embarrassingly ineffective on its own terms. We prefer to
advance our public diplomacy objectives by telling the truth to our
adversaries, rather than censor our own citizens.” Beattie did not explain how
exposing Chinese propaganda campaigns would restrict Americans’ freedom of
expression.
Further consequences continue to reverberate. On August
29, the State Department leadership also gave official notice to staff that it
was terminating more than two dozen agreements that the GEC had reached with
countries around the world. These agreements had been designed to create common
language and tactics to push back against Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and
terrorist influence campaigns overseas. In the cable sent to staff, the State
Department insisted that the agreements “infringed upon free speech enshrined
in the U.S. Constitution” and stated that “the best way to counter
disinformation is free speech.” But this is a strange argument to use in this
context, given that the GEC was literally a vehicle for free speech: Its main
function in the past several years was to publicly identify manipulation and
promote transparency. Also, as one former State senior official pointed out to
me, the department’s arguments make no sense, given that the administration is
seeking to dismantle America’s foreign broadcasters. If we want more free
speech, why are we suppressing our own voice?
***
Even more mysterious, in this sense, are the assaults on
the National Endowment for Democracy and its sister organizations, which
include the International Republican Institute, affiliated with the Republican
Party, and the National Democratic Institute, affiliated with the Democrats.
These organizations were not, before November, of special concern to Trump. All
of them were founded in 1983, inspired by Ronald Reagan’s call for new
institutions to “foster the infrastructure of democracy—the system of a free
press, unions, political parties, universities—which allows people to choose
their own way, to develop their own culture, to reconcile their own differences
through peaceful means.”
Until now they have also played important roles in
countering authoritarian propaganda and fighting censorship around the world.
NED makes small grants to groups that monitor elections, promote free speech,
fight kleptocracy, and counter authoritarian propaganda. For example, NED once
funded the Asia Fact Check Lab, which exposes and explains Chinese information
operations. The IRI has among other things polled more than 1.5 million people in more than 100 countries in
recent decades, helping provide reliable information about the public’s views,
often in places that don’t have many other sources. The NDI’s Open Government
Partnership was one of many programs designed to fight corruption.
The endowment has so far successfully
fought attempts to cut its funding in court, winning
an unambiguous legal ruling, with which the administration complied, to
preserve in full this year’s funding. NED also enjoys deep support across
Congress, and has an organizational structure designed to protect it from
political attack: It is run not by the U.S. government but by an independent,
bipartisan board, which allows it to keep its distance from partisan politics.
I was on that board from 2016 until 2024 and can attest that the conspiracy
theories are wrong. The endowment’s board members are not secret intelligence
officers but former civil servants, members of Congress, academics, and
regional experts. Nobody pays them for the work they do, pro bono, on NED’s
behalf.
The same kinds of unpaid boards run NDI and IRI,
organizations that have historically worked with center-left and center-right
political parties around the world and played special roles in connecting
members of Congress with their foreign counterparts—in other words, spreading
the American message around the world. Both have deep links to their respective
parties; notably, the IRI board includes Senators Mitt Romney, Lindsey Graham,
Joni Ernst, Tom Cotton, and Dan Sullivan. And yet all of these organizations
also became targets after a small number of accounts on X began attacking them.
(One of the accounts belongs to Mike Benz, who also
invented the “Biden censored 22 million tweets”
mythology, so there is a certain logic to his role.) Among other things, the
accounts falsely accuse the organizations of being CIA fronts—exactly the kind
of lie that Russian propagandists tell.
None of these organizations, and certainly not the
foreign broadcasters, has ever been offered a good-faith explanation for why
they continue to be monitored, audited, and threatened with closure. “The only
kind of communication we’ve gotten from USAGM, even at a staff level, is around
terminations and reactivation of our grant agreement,” one agency insider told
me on the condition of anonymity. “There’s no engagement on the work or the
substance or the capabilities of the organization whatsoever.” Yet the work has
never been more urgent. In the areas of censorship technology alone, cuts could
begin to have immediate impact if not reversed. If funding for their
virtual-private-network initiatives is not renewed, for example, the OTF will
have to cut off access for tens of millions of users in China, Russia, Cuba,
and Iran next November.
Chinese and Russian propagandists aren’t hiding how
pleased they are by cuts to the organizations that challenge them and their
narratives all over the world. Hu Xijin, the former editor of Global Times,
a Chinese state-backed publication, wrote on social media that the “Chinese people are happy to see the
U.S. anti-China ideological fortress breached from within.” Margarita Simonyan,
the editor in chief of RT, the Russian state news station, echoed this view on
a Russian talk show: “Today is a holiday for me and my colleagues at RT and
Sputnik,” she said soon after cuts to RFE/RL and VOA were announced. The show’s
host responded by gloating about fired Russian employees who “will now fight
for the right to work as cleaners and floor cleaners.” The host continued, “By
the way, I am addressing you, independent journalists: Die, you animals,
because you are lying, vile, disgusting traitors to the Motherland. Die in a
ditch.”
***
Lying, vile, disgusting traitors to the Motherland—the
extremity of this language is a clue to why these organizations matter.
Officials in Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, and other dictatorships hate
independent journalism and civic engagement for good reasons. Real information
exposes crime and corruption. Active citizens inspire people to hope for
something better. Inside Russia, they could help convince the public that the
war in Ukraine is a shocking waste of human life. Inside Iran, they could
inspire people to fight against a regime that’s destroying their economy and
carrying out a paranoid search for political enemies. More than 800 executions
have already taken place this year, a huge increase over last year’s pace.
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 such 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.
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