In March 2025, Trump moved to shut down Voice of America’s parent agency, and most of its staff were put on paid leave. Congress refused to go along, funding the agency at $643 million in a bill Trump signed. This past March, a federal judge ruled the layoffs invalid and ordered the staff back to work. The administration then asked an appeals court to pause that order while it appeals, and the court agreed. The result is a limbo: The administration can’t fire these employees. And it won’t let them work. A new State Department inspector general report found that 420 of them were still on paid leave as of July, at a cost of about $1.6 million a week.
Politico reports:
At the time, USAGM cast the moves explicitly as an effort to protect taxpayers. ... But rapidly cutting the agency did not necessarily mean the government stopped paying for it. …
A separate property audit found USAGM went at least seven months without an operational property management system after terminating the one it had used. Of 1,531 disposed items auditors examined, the agency could not provide supporting documentation for 1,512.
Congress debated VOA’s future, cut its budget by about a quarter, but kept it alive. That’s how spending decisions are supposed to be made. The administration instead tried to kill the agency by executive order without weighing the costs. Taxpayers are now paying to kill VOA while also paying to keep it alive.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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