Trump’s Crackdown on Crucial Agency Just Got Really Grim

Donald Trump’s recent spate of crackdowns and reshuffling at the Voice of America reveal the administration’s plan to transform the award-winning newsroom into a MAGA propaganda machine.

VOA’s chief national correspondent, Steve Herman, was placed under investigation last week, for allegedly expressing political bias against the Trump administration in his social media posts, according to The New York Times.

A memo sent to Herman listed a swath of reasons he’d come under scrutiny. One of the reasons cited is Trump’s executive order titled “One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations,” which includes the provision that “failure to faithfully implement the President’s policy is grounds for professional discipline, including separation.”

Herman said he has been placed under a paid “excused absence” and expects to lose his job, according to NPR.

This isn’t the first time Herman has been the subject of this kind of investigation: He was the subject of a probe about the same supposed issue during the last year of Trump’s first administration. That time, leadership at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, which oversees VOA, had claimed that Herman’s posts relaying criticism of Trump betrayed a political bias. A federal judge found that former USAGM CEO Michael Pack had violated journalists’ First Amendment rights by interfering with VOA.

By comparison, this probe is coming directly from VOA’s acting senior program director, John Featherly, with the approval of VOA’s director, Michael Abramowitz, a Biden-era figure. But again, the probe specifically cites Herman’s engagement with social media posts regarding the second Trump administration’s trove of controversies.

Crucially, Herman himself is not expressing any attitudes, only sharing perspectives critical of the Trump administration—not atypical for a journalist.

At the same time, VOA moved its White House bureau chief, Patsy Widakuswara, who has 27 years of experience, to another beat. Journalists at VOA told NPR that no rationale was given for the reshuffling.

That wasn’t the only shakeup at VOA last week.

Former TV anchor turned failed MAGA Senate candidate Kari Lake was made a special adviser at VOA, pending her confirmation to run the agency. Trump’s pick to head USAGM, Brent Bozell III, needs to be confirmed before Lake can formally take the reins from Abramowitz.

Lake has alleged liberal bias at VOA but promised that the agency “won’t become Trump TV.”

In an email announcing her appointment, USAGM’s chief, Roman Napoli, wrote that Lake’s experience “will be invaluable as we continue our mission to clearly and effectively present the policies of the Trump Administration around the world.”

As Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, pointed out in a series of posts on X Monday, “That is NOT the assignment that Congress gave USAGM.” Rather, the mission statement of USAGM, which is codified into U.S. law, is to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”

Herman’s likely dismissal and Widakuswara’s reassignment are “having a chilling effect on the entire institution,” one VOA staffer said, according to Stelter.

Some staffers believe that the changes are part of management’s efforts to obey in advance of true scrutiny from the Trump administration, Stelter reported. And apparently, it’s been going on for a while. “Four sources told CNN on condition of anonymity that multiple Trump-related stories have been watered down in recent months,” Stelter wrote.

A group of centrist Democrats is being mocked and criticized for their new strategy to defeat Donald Trump and Republicans.

Earlier this month, the centrist think tank Third Way gathered the group, which included Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials, and party leaders, in Loudoun County, Virginia, to come up with a game plan on how to return to relevancy, Politico reports. But the resulting conclusions seemed way off base.

For example, among the 20 solutions suggested for the party were to “embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery”; ban “far-left candidate questionnaires and refuse to participate in forums that create ideological purity tests”; and push “back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging.”

The plan also included a proposal to “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate,” which would seem to reject the money of many working-class donors and elevate billionaires and millionaires at a time when the Trump administration is being criticized as a wealthy oligarchy.

When Politico published its report on Sunday, the findings were immediately torn apart on social media.

One commentator pointed out that if Democrats were going to be rejecting small-dollar donors, they would shift toward wealthier campaign contributors coming from corporate sources.

The irony of meeting in Loudoun County, a wealthy Washington, D.C. suburb in northern Virginia, while concluding that candidates should “get out of elite circles and into real communities (e.g., tailgates, gun shows, local restaurants, churches)” was not lost on at least one critic.

None of the conclusions seem to really get at what has worked for Democrats in the past or reinforce what popular Democrats, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are doing right now. Democrats need to go back to their working-class roots to win back working-class voters, and unsurprisingly, a meeting of party elites in a rich locale isn’t going to yield any solutions on how to do that.

U.S. Agency for International Development acting assistant administrator Nicholas Enrich—who was placed on administrative leave for writing two damning memos regarding the agency’s recent failure to provide lifesaving international aid in the midst of Marco Rubio’s program freeze—was about to publish a third. And it’s even worse than the rest, according to The Bulwark.

In his first memo, Enrich described severe staff reductions, from 783 positions to 69, and in his second, he noted that 72 different USAID activities had no funding, leading to a death toll that is “not known.” But in his third memo, Enrich estimates how many people will die or get deadly diseases as a result of the cuts.

The memo notes that a permanent halt of $7.7 billion in aid could lead to “12.5–17.9 million cases of malaria with an additional 71,000–166,000 deaths annually,” “a 28 to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally,” “an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year,” and in a potential worst-case scenario, over “28,000 cases of Ebola, Marburg, or related diseases,” according to The Bulwark’s summary.

These programs are much more critical than the Trump administration would have the public believe, as it peddles false conspiracy theories about USAID like the agency providing condoms for Hamas.

Enrich went on to write that potentially 17 million pregnant women would lose access to lifesaving services, more than 11 million newborns would go without postnatal care, and about one million children would not receive treatment for severe acute malnutrition.

“Weakened disease surveillance doesn’t only jeopardize natural outbreak detection—it also creates openings for malicious actors,” he wrote. “Global health monitoring systems serve as the ‘smoke alarm’ for unusual disease patterns that could signal a bioterrorism event. If those alarms are switched off or muted due to lack of funding, a deliberate release of a pathogen could spread for weeks under the guise of a normal outbreak.”

Sources close to Enrich told The Bulwark that he knew publishing the memos would be career suicide. And while this memo is a crucial look into what is actually being lost in these cuts, it’s likely Trump will never lay eyes on it.

Protesters plagued Vice President JD Vance’s vacation over the weekend, calling out the second-highest-ranking executive branch leader for the administration’s catastrophic agenda.

Vance was less than welcome during a family ski trip to Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort on Saturday, as hundreds of protesters gathered to express their outrage at the official and his connection to the Trump administration.

Demonstrators lining the streets in Waitsfield lamented the administration’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda, while others argued that the country “is in serious trouble” under Trump’s leadership.

“Our democracy is at risk, and we have people who don’t care about people,” Terry Bambrick from Richmond, Vermont, told the crowd, reported NBC 5.

A smattering of signage posted online captured the local resentment: “Proud of Mad River Valley, Disgusted by This Administration”; “SHAME”; “Go fuck a couch, not my country”; “Support your local co-op, not this fkn coup”; “bully JD Vance, go away.”

Shops and storefronts in the area also participated in the protest, placing signage out front to inform the vice president that he would receive no service in the Green Mountain State.

“Sorry VP, sold out,” read a sign outside of Mad River Glen in Waitsfield.

“Vance? We thought Elon was VP,” read a sign posted on the sidewalk.

Others turned out to express their horror that the vice president had bombed a potential peace talk between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday, escalating tensions and instigating conflict between the two presidents by claiming that the Ukrainian leader had not been grateful for U.S. aid.

One demonstrator held up a sign that said, “Vance is a traitor” who should “go ski in Russia.”

As Vance departed on Sunday back to Washington, one local, Tommy Lovegood, had a message for the vice president: “This is Vermont. You don’t belong here,” Lovegood told NBC 5.

Elon Musk’s latest futile foray to get federal workers to spill about their week at work has seriously started to annoy members of Donald Trump’s own Cabinet, The Washington Post reported Monday.

Government workers began to receive a wave of emails Friday with the subject “What did you do last week? Part II,” the sequel to Musk’s ineffectual accomplishment email from the week before. Once again, the emails appeared to come from an account linked to human resources at the Office of Personnel Management, and prompted workers to respond by the end of the day Monday “each week,” copying their managers on their responses.

As soon as the emails began to arrive so did instructions from department heads—prompting workers to ignore the email.

At the Department of Energy, one official told staff not to respond to any emails prompting them to list their accomplishments. Employees told the Post that even their Trump-appointed leadership had grown weary of the Department of Government Efficiency’s tedious directives, as the agency was already enacting Trump’s sweeping agenda to boost fossil fuel production in the face of his so-called “national energy emergency.”

In addition to Musk’s emails, agencies have already been dealing with DOGE’s recommendations to implement massive layoffs. Earlier this month, the DOE laid off between 1,200 and 2,000 of its roughly 14,000 employees as part of DOGE’s government-wide purge of federal workers.

One DOE employee told the Post that the emails represented a “power struggle” between DOGE and federal agencies. Another suggested that the emails were designed to unnerve federal workers.

“It does give off ‘psychological warfare’ vibes to send these when they know folks would be heading to bed, or cooking dinner, on weekends in particular,” the employee said.

At the State Department, Undersecretary for Management Tibor P. Nagy sent out an email to employees assuring them that management would “respond on the behalf of our workforce,” according to an email obtained by the Post. At least one ambassador also sent out instructions to ignore Musk’s demand.

Once again, Musk insisted on social media that responding to his “pulse check” email was “mandatory for the executive branch.”

But, in the end, it seems like Musk’s email just isn’t good for efficiency.

One employee at the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if two million federal employees spent 15 minutes responding to emails, at their average wage of $35 per hour, they would ultimately waste 500,000 hours and cost the government $17.5 million.

“That’s a conservative estimate,” the employee told the Post. “There are more than two million feds, and most of us spent way more than 15 minutes between trying to figure out what it meant, meetings about whether to respond or not and actually writing the email.”

The employee also pointed out that many federal employees already write reports on their weekly accomplishments, and that Musk’s redundancy-hunting email was ultimately redundant itself.