U.S. Information Agency USIA

As the Cold War became a contest of ideas, President Dwight Eisenhower created the U.S. Information Agency through a reorganization plan that took effect on August 1, 1953, pulling information programs out of the State Department into a separate agency. Its mission, often summarized as telling America's story to the world, built on wartime propaganda work and on the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which authorized government information programs abroad while barring their distribution at home.

USIA ran Voice of America radio broadcasts in dozens of languages, operated American libraries, cultural centers, and reading rooms in cities around the world, produced films, magazines, and exhibitions such as the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, and staffed embassies with public affairs officers. From 1978 it also managed educational and cultural exchanges, including the Fulbright Program and visitor programs that brought thousands of future foreign leaders to the United States. It sponsored jazz tours and art exhibits meant to showcase American culture.

With the end of the Cold War, Congress and the Clinton administration consolidated foreign affairs agencies in the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, which abolished USIA effective October 1, 1999. Its information and exchange programs moved into the State Department under a new Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy, and its broadcasting became independent under what is now the U.S. Agency for Global Media. Supporters of the merger said it would integrate public diplomacy with foreign policy, while many former officials have argued that America lost a focused, expert voice abroad just as new information competitors emerged.