EXCLUSIVE: Kari Lake cuts waste, fraud and abuse at VOA, vows to restore American values to network

In response to the executive order, Kari Lake, senior advisor to the agency that oversees VOA, United States Agency for Global Media, cut grants to global programs, such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting, among others. She's put nearly half the workforce on administrative leave.

Lake has also cancelled the lease, she told The Post Millennial, for a "shiny, beautiful building on Pennsylvania Avenue to house the agency, including VOA, even though there's not any broadcasting capabilities in that building." That lease would have cost a "quarter of a billion dollars," Lake said. She's also canceled contracts with Reuters, AP, and Agence France Press. Cuts were also made to the Office for Cuba Broadcasting. The broadcasts were reaching over 420 million people per week.

Trump nominated Kari Lake to head the agency, but after those working under the Biden administration "Trump-proofed" the agency, as she told The Post Millennial, it would have taken 7 appointments to be confirmed in the Senate before they could even get around to hers. Instead of head of VOA, Trump named Lake senior advisor to the agency that oversees VOA, United States Agency for Global Media.

"We terminated all of the contracts for Reuters, the AP, the Agence France Press," Lake said, noting that these were hefty prices for USAGM to pay to essentially reprint articles from those publications. "But we're a media company, right? We shouldn't have to rely on the AP and Reuters and Agence France Press to tell us what news is. We should be out, going out, uncovering stories, digging up the news and covering it ourselves."

"If we're a billion-dollar news agency," Lake said, "we shouldn't need to spend hundreds of millions of dollars paying these other outlets to tell us what the news is. We should be going out and producing our own news. And if we can't do that, then the taxpayers of this country need to demand answers as to why we can't do that."

The Voice of America charter was drafted in 1960, signed into law in 1976 by President Gerald Ford, and has over the decades been built up into a behemoth of an agency with an annual budget of over $267 million. It had been broadcasting well before that, however, getting its start in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda.

The Charter for the Voice of America states , "The long-range interests of the United States are served by communicating directly with the people's of the world by radio." As such, the VOA has a three-pronged mission. Those are: to "serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news from which news will be accurate, objective and comprehensive." To "represent America, not any single segment of American society," and to "therefore present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions." And finally, to "present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively" and to "present responsible discussions and opinions on these policies."

So what has it been doing for the past 64 years? According to Lake, it's been raking in taxpayer dollars, using them to fund a biased mission and biased press, and spreading global soft power driven by an ethos that are not in line with American values. After the order came down from Trump on Friday, Lake set about making cuts.

"I brought DOGE in and realized we had to start going through the finances and everything with a fine-tooth comb," she told The Post Millennial. "And so we've been doing that." The goal, she said is "to scale everything back to the statutory minimum." That order from Trump, entitled Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, made cuts to several agencies, including the USAGM. DOGE's leader Elon Musk said, "Nobody listens to [VOA] anymore."

Lake and her team have "found that there is incredible waste, fraud, abuse, self-dealing and corruption." And already they've made serious cuts, such as cancelling the grants of

Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting, among others. Termination notices to those grantees started going out Saturday morning. and many employees, Lake said, "are right now on paid administrative leave" while Lake and the agency assess how to scale back to the statutory minimum. There are 1700-1900 employees at USAGM along with many contractors.

Despite the cuts, Lake is confident that the agency is "going to deliver on all the statutory programs. Whatever the statute says we must deliver on, we will, and will shed light on everything that is not statutorily required: waste, fraud and abuse, which run rampant in this agency." Lake added that she found "massive national security violations, including spies and terrorist sympathizers and terrorist supporters who have infiltrated the agency."

When asked if the pull back of the global media grants was a roll back of American soft power, Lake said that it was, but that the content being served was not in line with American values. She gave the example of Hungary, where Biden's USAID head Samantha Powers bolstered alternative media and the LGBTQ+ community as an attempt to counteract conservative leader Victor Orban.

"Radio Free Europe actually did the same thing in Hungary," Lake said, "they started up a language service there that I heard many people complain about, saying, ‘Why are we treating Hungary like they're our adversary when they're an ally?’”

"Soft power," Lake said, "should be used to out information and a message that reflects America's values and is in line with our policy, not something that's in line with our adversaries. We would never want to put out information that is pro-CCP, or pro-Iranian regime."

She emphasized that the executive order from Trump scaling back the agency to its bones was not about soft power, but to "scale back the bureaucracy.” She added, “This government has gotten out of control. We cannot continue to afford things the way they're going as a country, and so for a variety of reasons, we need to scale things back. And we certainly, you know, a soft power should actually be a power that is used for the good of the country and not in any way detrimental to the country. And I don't think we can say that that's been happening with our media outlets that are government funded."