By Scott Nover
The Trump administration’s dismantling of the agency that oversees Voice of America and other government-funded news operations was necessary because it is “incompetent, corrupt, biased, and a threat to America’s national security and standing in the world,” Kari Lake told a House committee Wednesday.
Making her first-ever appearance before Congress, Lake defended her tenure and said the U.S. Agency for Global Media needs to be shrunk until it can be eliminated.
Lake, the senior adviser to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which runs VOA and funds a handful of global media networks, has taken a hack-and-slash approach that, unless halted by federal courts, will lead to an 85 percent reduction in force and a severe curtailing of the agency’s reach overseas. Most USAGM staffers have been placed on paid administrative leave since March, more than 500 contractors have been fired, and more than 600 full-time staffers received termination notices last week.
In testimony before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, led by Chairman Brian Mast (R-Florida), Lake alleged that the agency has been marred by dysfunction and is unable to be fixed in its current form.
“I was sworn in at USAGM as Senior Adviser on March 3, and it became clear in the following weeks that reform was not possible,” Lake said in prepared remarks.
She said she’s committed to making sure the agency is “lean and mean” while admitting she supports its total elimination in the future. “The agency itself is not needed,” she said, saying she would like to see it fall under the State Department.
Lake extensively criticized what she characterized as “security shortfalls,” including one instance where a foreign operative was hired for work by VOA. That was Pavel Rubtsov, who went by the name Pablo González while working for VOA as a freelance cameraman between 2020 and 2021, in addition to other outlets, before being arrested by Polish authorities in 2022. He was later released to Russia as part of the 2024 prisoner swap involving Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich.
She also alleged that the agency misused J-1 visas to hire foreign journalists, which was a point of contention from former USAGM chief executive Michael Pack during the first Trump administration. Lake called the use of these visas “blatant and unlawful.” However, the State Department has a specific classification for USAGM journalists to receive three-year visas — longer than most one-year visas for J-1 for work- and study-based exchange program participants.
NewsGuild-CWA, a union that represents Radio Free Asia staffers, told the committee in a letter that eliminating funding risks sending journalists on visas back to dangerous home countries and deprive those countries of reliable, independent news reports.
“This situation is not just a humanitarian crisis for the journalists a?ected; it is a threat to the United States’ ability to counter authoritarian propaganda around the globe,” wrote the union’s president, Jon Schleuss.
Lake also took issue with USAGM’s lease for a new building, which she canceled; wasteful spending by officials; and settlements paid out to former employees, among other complaints. Her biggest complaint was the statutorily mandated fire wall between the government and its journalists, which she said limited her from fixing many of the issues with what she considers biased coverage.
In the hearing, points of debate split down partisan lines.
Republicans widely praised Lake’s efforts at USAGM, though some also asserted the need for American broadcasting into adversarial countries such as China, Russia and Iran. “We need America’s voice in Iran right now,” said Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), the former chairman of the committee. Lake recalled 75 previously let-go Persian news service staffers this month to cover military actions between Iran and Israel, but many of those same recalled staffers were sent termination notices in the days since.
Rep. Young Kim (R-California) told Lake that she is concerned about America’s ability to fight in the global information war, especially in Asia, given the cuts to VOA and Radio Free Asia.
Democrats railed against Lake’s dismantling of the agency, characterizing it as haphazard and demanding that she explain what analysis she conducted before making extensive cuts. “These are ridiculous questions,” Lake told Rep. Gregory W. Meeks (New York), the top Democrat on the committee, when he pressed her about it.
Reps. Greg Stanton (D-Arizona), Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington), and Gabe Amo (D-Rhode Island) said Lake lacks qualifications to lead a news organization because of her persistent and false claims of election denial in her own races and President Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential election loss. Amo called Lake a “nightmare for the free press” but a friend to America’s adversaries.
Another point of contention was Lake’s unwillingness to meet with the grantee networks that USAGM funds, which includes Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
“Since she arrived at USAGM, Ms. Lake has not spent a single minute with us or our senior teams,” Stephen Capus, Bay Fang and Jeffrey Gedmin, the CEOs of RFE/RL, RFA and MBN, respectively wrote in a joint statement to the committee’s leadership ahead of the hearing. “She has not visited our offices or inspected our operations. She has not spent a moment with our editors, journalists, producers, and audience researchers. She has not met with our independent boards of directors. Simply put, Ms. Lake has shown not one iota of interest in our content; nor has she asked us about our plans for reform, restructure, and improvement.”
When asked about this by committee members, Lake said she didn’t get around to meeting with them before their lawsuit — and now will not meet with them since they’re all suing her in federal court.
The International Broadcasting Advisory Board, a bipartisan, congressionally created oversight body that was dismissed by Trump in January just after he took office, also said it never received any communication from Lake. “After the 2024 presidential election, we participated in lengthy conversations with the Trump Transition team, and in December 2024, upon her naming as the new head of VOA, we repeatedly attempted to contact Ms. Lake to discuss her nomination, which by law requires IBAB approval,” they wrote in a statement. “She never responded to our outreach and did not solicit our ideas from our year of service before the IBAB’s unexpected termination by the White House in January 2025.”
Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-Pennsylvania) said she felt like she was suffering from a “propaganda war” while listening to Lake’s testimony and her Republican counterparts. “For those of you who think that this is about reform, it’s not,” she told her colleagues. “It’s about shutting down media.”
