Once a Cold War-era powerhouse for U.S. diplomacy, the U.S. Agency for Global Media has been gutted under a Trump executive order — slashing 1,400 jobs, or 85% of its workforce — in a move Kari Lake calls a win for taxpayers and critics warn is a death knell for press freedom.
Lake, senior adviser to the agency, said the cuts fulfill the March 14 directive from President Donald Trump to shrink the federal workforce and eliminate non-essential operations. “This is a decisive action to shrink the out-of-control federal bureaucracy,” Lake said Friday, calling USAGM “bloated, unaccountable” and plagued by “dysfunction, bias and waste.”
