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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The parent agency of Voice of America said on Friday it had issued termination notices to over 639 more staff, completing an 85% decrease in personnel since March and effectively spelling the end of a broadcasting network founded to counter Nazi propaganda.
Kari Lake, senior advisor to the U.S. Agency for Global Media, said the staff reduction meant 1,400 positions had been eliminated as part of U.S. President Donald Trump’s agenda to cut staffing at the agency to a statutory minimum.
"Reduction in Force Termination Notices were sent to 639 employees at USAGM and Voice of America, part of a long-overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy," Lake said in a statement.
She said the agency had been "riddled with dysfunction, bias, and waste."
Lake said the move meant USAGM now operated near its statutory minimum of 81 employees. She said 250 employees would remain across USAGM, Voice of America, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which transmits news into communist-run Cuba. She said none of OCB’s 33 employees had been terminated.
The move likely marks an end to VOA, which was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, operated in nearly 50 languages and reached 360 million people a week, many living under authoritarian regimes.
In May, nearly 600 VOA contractors were dismissed.
Some Republicans have accused VOA and other publicly funded media outlets of being biased against conservatives, and called for them to be shuttered as part of wider efforts to shrink the government.
Another USAGM station, Radio Free Asia, which has already been reduced to skeleton staffing, said in a staff email on Friday that it was implementing additional furloughs in its human resources, ordinance, journalist security, and research, training & evaluation teams.
Various court cases are in train against the USAGM cuts.