U.S. Agency for Global Media USAGM

Voice of America first broadcast on February 1, 1942, to counter Nazi propaganda, and during the Cold War Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty broadcast into the Soviet bloc. The International Broadcasting Act of 1994 placed U.S. international broadcasting under the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which was renamed the U.S. Agency for Global Media in 2018 and is led by a Chief Executive Officer. VOA's charter, enacted in 1976, requires it to be accurate, objective, and comprehensive.

USAGM oversees Voice of America, a federal entity, and funds independent grantee networks: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and the Open Technology Fund, which supports tools to evade internet censorship. The Office of Cuba Broadcasting runs Radio and TV Marti. Before 2025 the networks reached hundreds of millions of people weekly in dozens of languages, often in countries without a free press. A legal firewall is meant to protect their journalists from political interference.

On March 14, 2025, an executive order directed USAGM to be cut to its legal minimum, after which most VOA staff were placed on leave, much of its programming went silent for the first time in decades, and grants to the independent networks were terminated. Journalists, the networks, and members of both parties challenged the moves in court and Congress, with mixed results. On March 17, 2026, a federal judge ruled that the attempt to shut down the agency and take Voice of America off the air was illegal, holding that Congress had required the broadcasts and left leadership discretion only over how to carry them out. Supporters of the cuts said the broadcasters were wasteful and biased, while critics, including some former Republican officials, said shutting them down ceded ground to Chinese and Russian state media.