The Rot at the U.S. Agency for Global Media

By Michael McCaul

Wednesday, February 07, 2024

 

Most Americans have never heard of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), a tiny piece of the federal bureaucracy that funds news reporting in countries where freedom and democracy are in short supply. In recent years, though, this small agency has experienced an extraordinary crisis of leadership. The recent rot of dysfunction formed on a bed of groupthink, political bias, and self-dealing. The lesson? When management officials stand to benefit from a lack of outside scrutiny, subterfuge and misdirection become survival tactics. Fortunately, in this case, congressional oversight identified wrongdoing. But the mea culpa has yet to come.

 

As a forthcoming report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee lays out, the story is straight out of a detective novel: A top-level executive is accused of verbally harassing staff, mismanaging public funds, and lying about educational credentials from an elite European university. Whistleblowers file a complaint with the inspector general, and the agency’s HR department begins to investigate. The allegations are confirmed, and the official is ultimately issued a “notice of removal” while President Trump is still in office. President Biden takes over shortly before the firing can be finalized. In the midst of this transition, the official somehow gets to keep the job — with no discipline of any kind. Meanwhile, the agency, with Democrats newly in charge, “reinvestigates” the relevant conduct and — surprise, surprise — exonerates the official. According to Biden supporters embedded in the agency, HR, under Trump, made a mistake.

 

That, however, was not the end of the story. The agency’s about-face raised eyebrows across Washington. The detailed termination letter issued during the Trump era did not read like a political hit job. Yet the new administration, faced with its recitation of the facts, declared “nothing to see here” — why? Second, the dispute did not stop at the water’s edge. French embassy officials became involved in what turned into a global search for the truth. With Capitol Hill, the French, and the agency all investigating simultaneously, the questions became: Who’s lying? Who’s covering up what? Which documents are real? Much more than your average HR dispute, this affair implicated the top brass at the agency — including the CEO herself — who refused to take very simple steps: demand a diploma, search the relevant educational database, and do more than Google “the Sorbonne.” Through a mix of incompetence, willful blindness, and deliberate obfuscation, senior officials did everything possible to protect their own, even if it meant misleading and obstructing Congress.

 

The agency dragged its feet and repeatedly changed its story. When Congress informed USAGM, in 2021, that, per the French, the individual did not have any sort of doctorate, the agency dug in its heels, refused to speak to the embassy, and hoped the story would go away. Well, it didn’t. For two more years, whistleblowers kept crying foul, and French assessments kept implying fraud. Today, the agency continues to dawdle. How long can USAGM continue to disrespect the line-level employees who reported the misconduct — not to mention Congress and U.S. taxpayers?

 

The larger story here is the dangerous power of institutional inertia: the refusal by the agency, charged with serving the American people and maintaining the public trust, first to take whistleblowers seriously, and then to admit it blundered by not doing so. At worst, these failures evince a deliberate effort to protect a loyalist insider and cover up her wrongdoing. It should not take three years of fighting tooth and nail — nor require multiple internal and external investigations — to resolve federal personnel matters.

 

When it comes to vetting foreign nationals and credentials, competence among the federal bureaucracy is apparently hit or miss. In this case, it seems that not only USAGM — but also the State Department, which at one point formally vouched for the veracity of the lying official’s French degree — was duped. Across the federal government, it is impossible to know how many more résumé fabricators slip through the cracks and are not who they say they are. Some are surely saboteurs, though, as recent revelations have confirmed. Unless the federal bureaucracy elevates its capacity to investigate those in positions of trust, we should fear the consequences for national security — particularly as advances in artificial intelligence make fakery easier, and harder to detect.

 

Ultimately, the reputational truth that has been exposed at USAGM is this: The U.S. cannot effectively and credibly combat disinformation abroad when federal employees peddle disinformation about themselves — and agency leadership for years defends it.