The U.S. Agency for Global Media has been the subject of a political and legal tug-of-war since President Trump in March 2025 named acolyte Kari Lake to lead it and ultimately shut down the agency.
Just this month, a judge made two rulings on the matter. The first was that Lake could not be the agency's CEO because her appointment didn’t follow Senate confirmation requirements, therefore, her layoffs at Voice of America, which operates under USAGM, were invalid.
The second was that the Trump administration's mass layoffs, a reported 1,042, and other actions to dismantle USAGM were "illegal," "arbitrary," and "capricious," thus ordering the journalists be reinstated.
However, the Trump administration is appealing the federal judge's ruling that deemed the Voice of America shutdown illegal.
The Trump White House's initial argument to dismantle the Voice of America and other taxpayer-funded news outlets under USAGM was that they were producing "radical propaganda" and had become wasteful and corrupt.
“When I first got into the agency, I started pulling all kinds of documents, looking at various agreements, looking at many of the past investigations they had done on alleged corruption in the agency,” Lake told Full Measure in an exclusive interview. “And as I dug through all of that, I realized, ‘Oh my gosh, this thing is even worse than I heard it was when I got in there.’”
Major decisions under Lake besides the mass layoffs and restructuring at Voice of America included anti-corruption and cost-saving moves.
The challenge to all of this originated from a lawsuit brought by VOA journalists along with federal employee unions including AFSCME, plus some press freedom organizations. They sought to restore the agency to what it was prior to Trump.
The Agency for Global Media has roots tracing back to World War II with efforts to counter enemy propaganda. Today, it provides US taxpayer-funded news globally.
News groups funded by the US Agency for Global Media include VOA, Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia.
But reports and audits have revealed massive scandals ranging from bias to waste, corruption, and national security threats.
Lake, a former local Fox News TV broadcaster and 2024 Arizona GOP Senate nominee, says about half the agency's workforce was never properly vetted.
“You have to realize, once you get in at this agency, you have access to get into any part of the government,” Lake says.
“And if we're hiring people with sketchy backgrounds from countries that don't like us, that now all of a sudden have access to the government, and we intentionally didn't do the background check that was required, that’s criminal really in my mind, especially knowing that many of them.
"As we started to reassess and look back at ‘Where are these people, where have they gone?’ There were, I believe, 500 of them were never able to track down and figure out where they went. Were they real people? Were they ghost employees? Were they spies who came in? And they were given fake social security numbers. And then, did they disappear somewhere into the federal government?”
Full Measure asked in response: "Who gave them the fake social security numbers?”
Lake replied: "The agency did. The agency did— to bring them in.”
Lake also takes issue with what she calls biased reporting.
"When I got in, I saw a lot of very disturbing things about how things were being spent, past content that we put on. I mean, two days after President Trump got inaugurated, they put up a graphic with President Trump's face and a swastika over it. I would've been appalled if they did that with Joe Biden,” she said.
“Who were they broadcasting it to?” Full Measure asked.
"They were broadcasting it to our Spanish language audience. And I just said, ‘Oh my God, this is just so bad. What's going on?’”
As Lake made cuts and transformations, critics went on the attack. At a hearing before Congress, Democrats laid into Lake:
“The Trump administration's allergy to truth and democracy is leading a short-sighted hatchet job on a critical tool for diplomacy and facts," New York Democrat Rep. Gregory Meeks said. "We should defend USAGM and free media, not rubber-stamp this dismantling.”
Said Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Madeleine Dean: “Adversaries are delighted at your plans to strip this agency. This is not reform – it's shutting down vital media with a rushed process and no serious assessment. You're acting as a propaganda machine for the Trump administration, harming our ability to promote truth abroad while our enemies fill the voids you've created.”
Said Rhode Island Democrat Rep. Gabe Amo: “Under your leadership, USAGM has been shattered – cutting programs and funding, trying to shutter global news operations.”
The Trump administration is challenging the latest court rulings that unravel nearly a year of reforms at the Agency. Meantime, the new head is Sarah Rogers with Lake staying on as deputy CEO.
For more on this story, watch "Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson” Sunday. Attkisson's most recent book is "Follow the $cience: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails."