Gutting USAGM and the Strategic Blunder of Abandoning Shortwave Broadcast

Project 2025's chapter on the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) presents a contradictory case: it acknowledges that shortwave radio is 'of critical strategic importance' during major conflicts—explicitly citing Ukraine—yet its core recommendation is to gut the agency's independence, eliminate the VOA firewall, and place broadcasters under direct State Department or NSC command. The authors, including Michael Pack and Frank Wuco, treat the agency's broadcasters as unreliable tools that need to be 'brought to heel' to 'tell America's story' rather than exercise independent journalism. But this is precisely the wrong lesson from history: VOA was most trusted and effective during the Cold War precisely *because* of its reputation for editorial independence, not in spite of it.

What has already been executed—a reduction of USAGM staff by more than 85% between March and July 2025, driven by the March 14, 2025 Executive Order on 'Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy'—has effectively dismantled the agency's capacity to operate shortwave transmitters, maintain foreign-language bureaus, or provide life-saving information in war zones. That reduction is underway now. The administration has not yet formally eliminated the VOA firewall or placed the agency under direct State Department command, as Project 2025 calls for, but the staffing cuts achieve the same strategic effect: crippling independent journalism. A November 2025 preliminary injunction on the termination of USAGM collective bargaining agreements buys a small pause, but the damage to broadcast capacity is already done.

The security cost is large and measurable. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, shortwave radio became the only resilient medium for reaching millions of people when the internet and power grids were attacked. The very scenario Project 2025's chapter describes as a reason to *preserve* shortwave is now being accelerated by the administration's dismantling of the only agency that operates it. Meanwhile, competitors like China's CGTN and Russia's RT fill the vacuum, broadcasting propaganda with impunity. A strategy rooted in restraint and humanitarian investment would instead reinforce the VOA firewall, fully fund shortwave and digital resilience projects, and maintain the agency's independence—because the cheapest, most humane, and most effective way to counter adversaries is to let truthful, credible journalism do its work, not to try to command it.