The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken Washington by storm. It is churning through longstanding institutions, from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). DOGE’s defenders point to reduced wasteful spending and eliminated duplicative programs.
True, DOGE has identified indefensible federal initiatives worthy of curtailment. The problem is that DOGE appears to know only one solution to this problem: burn it all down. The ensuing disruption is imperiling core U.S. interests. Eliminating USAID endangered counter-Chinese Communist Party (CCP) programs put in place in President Donald Trump’s first term. Likewise, DOGE’s indiscriminate cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) opened the door for Beijing to poach former grantees.
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Most recently, DOGE’s shakedown of USAGM has implicated the entire suite of America’s public diplomacy entities. Among them is Radio Free Asia (RFA), an outlet established in 1996 to report “within Asian nations whose people do not fully enjoy freedom of expression.” This mission of surrogate broadcasting is central to RFA’s identity and its value for the United States. If RFA dies, Washington would lose unmatched insight into China, and the Chinese people would lose the closest thing they have to a free press.
President Trump has a rare instinct for identifying political leverage. RFA gives U.S. leaders unique leverage in the form of intelligence that has consistently outclassed reporting from competing outlets. American journalists reporting inside China rely heavily on RFA’s on-the-ground connections and networks that bring sunlight to an otherwise opaque information environment.
RFA does not focus on U.S. domestic politics. Unlike the Voice of America, a related entity, RFA doesn’t report on America. It reports about corrupt governments like the CCP to their own people. That’s powerful work that burnishes America’s influence and reputation, but it also rebounds to Washington’s benefit.
When the CCP was scrambling to conceal China’s true death toll in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, RFA exposed the cover-up. Before mainstream Western journalists reported on Beijing’s genocide of Uyghurs, RFA uncovered the political reeducation camps in Xinjiang. RFA has also revealed CCP persecution of Christians in China, and highlighted Beijing’s use of cruise tourism in the Artic to advance the CCP’s geopolitical ambitions. RFA also reported on the CCP’s weaponization of “fake news” in 2023 to interfere in Taiwan’s presidential election.
Last Friday, RFA received notice that its annual federal grant had been terminated. Even a short interruption in its operations could spell disaster because of the sensitive nature of Radio Free Asia’s work in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), one of the most closed media environments in the world. Decades of carefully cultivated sources could evaporate overnight, and rebuilding these networks could take years. The CCP knows this all too well — that’s why it’s openly celebrating RFA’s potential demise.
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On issue after issue since Trump’s second inauguration, DOGE has behaved recklessly and unwittingly accomplished Xi Jinping’s work for him. The department’s targeting of RFA is irrational and indefensible. DOGE staff are embarrassing the United States and weakening Trump’s hand against America’s greatest adversary.
The president should step in, stop the bleeding, and preserve RFA’s ability to do what it has always done: fight fake news abroad to make America stronger and safer at home.
Michael Sobolik is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and author of Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance (Naval Institute Press, 2024). Follow him on X @michaelsobolik.