The parent agency of Voice of America and other taxpayer-funded media are “incompetent and mismanaged, deeply corrupt,” Kari Lake, senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, told a House panel Wednesday.
“This place is rotten. It’s rotten to the core,” said Lake during testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
“President Trump has asked me to go in and help clean it up,” she continued. “He’s also issued an executive order to reduce this agency down to its mandate, to its statutory requirement. That’s exactly what I’m doing. I don’t care if they attack me. We’re going to make it right for the American taxpayers.”
President Donald Trump initially tapped Lake to be the director of Voice of America, but the president recently appointed her to oversee the scandal-plagued U.S. Agency for Global Media.
The agency oversees America’s international media operations (including Voice of America), and its subagencies broadcast news and information about the United States and the world to audiences abroad.
Lake recounted reports from the Office of Personnel Management and the Office of Director of National Intelligence about the lack of vetting of employees and the hiring of employees with falsified documents, incomplete background checks, and phony names—some of whom were spies from hostile countries.
“The VOA even once paid for someone who worked previously for Russian media writing anti-American stories to come on the staff and continue to write anti-American stories,” Lake said.
Ahead of the hearing, the News Guild, part of the Communications Workers of America union, sent a letter to the House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman and ranking member that warned of the national security peril that could result from cuts and changes to U.S.-sponsored international broadcasting.
Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., the ranking member of the committee, defended the agency and its mission.
“Is USAGM [U.S. Agency for Global Media] and the work it supports unsalvageable waste, as you have said, or is it a critical tool for diplomacy?” Meeks asked Lake. “What you’re doing isn’t efficiency, it’s chaos. The dysfunction lies in the administration’s allergy to truth and democracy, the two pillars that USAGM aims to promote abroad. So, I’m not surprised by the choice to gut USAGM since the first Trump administration targeted the enterprise, violating laws, and journalistic integrity to shape it into a state media, like Russia’s or North Korea’s. Today, those regimes are actually cheering as we surrender another potent set of soft-power tools and abandon the airwaves.”
But the committee chairman, Brian Mast, R-Fla., said the international media agency has “lost its way” from its founding mission.
“Prior to this administration taking office again, the agency was riddled with OIG [Office of the Inspector General] reports and investigations demonstrating that USAGM had become a cesspool of lies, spies, and mismanagement. That is not an exaggeration,” Mast said. “The agency has promoted the very propaganda that it was created to defeat.”
Mast added, “Because of Chinese pressure, Voice of America censored interviews with Chinese dissidents.” He further said the VOA “suppressed stories about Iran and its terrorist proxies.”
He noted that the VOA hired an admitted Taliban fighter to criticize Trump’s travel ban decision from countries with high terrorist activities.
“This is only a partisan issue because President Trump is in the White House,” Mast said. “The fact is, Republican and Democratic administrations alike have exposed USAGM’s hiring, vetting, and messaging failures. … It is important that every taxpayer dollar works for where those dollars come from, the American people, not Xi Jinping, not Vladimir Putin, not the Ayatollah.”
Lake told the House panel the agency spent $6 million on consulting advice that was never implemented, more than $800,000 on a New York music show, and $100,000 for an Afghanistan cricket team, among other unusual expenses.