After hobbling VOA, new Trump strategy on terrorism would boost counter-propaganda

WASHINGTON – A new White House strategy paper calls for stepping up efforts to counter terror groups’ propaganda – a role played by Voice of America until President Donald Trump kneecapped the government-run news broadcaster last year.

The 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy released May 6 calls for “effective counter-propaganda means to identify and neutralize the media platforms of terror groups and identify and locate plotters before they can kill Americans.”

The strategy puts special focus on propaganda from al-Qaida, the group responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and from an Afghan offshoot of ISIS.

Before Trump’s cuts, VOA reached more than 354 million people worldwide. In Pakistan and Afghanistan, it aired 222 hours of programming per week, in Pashto, Dari and Urdu. That’s now down to 5 hours, eliminating the Urdu service and a Pashto service that served the area along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

“Our absence has produced a big hole and a vacuum, and that vacuum can and probably is being filled by forces that may not necessarily be forces of the good,” said Ayesha Tanzeem, the director of VOA’s South and Central Asia division.

Tanzeem has been on paid leave since March 2025, along with most other VOA journalists.

Before that, she led a staff of roughly 300 people, broadcasting 308 hours of programming per week in a dozen languages, with correspondents in Afghanistan, Pakistan and eight other countries. Nearly all are on leave or have had their contracts terminated, she said.

Tanzeem said most news outlets in Afghanistan are controlled by the Taliban.

So, the propaganda cited by the White House strategy paper – in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere – goes largely unchallenged by U.S. broadcasts.

VOA employees point to anti-American broadcasts from religious extremist groups. After the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, for instance, local news outlets provided coverage heavily slanted to a pro-Hamas point of view, Tanzeem recalled.

“The very fact that we explained all of these things to people in their own language, I believe as a journalist, had an impact in people understanding that America was not out to get them, which was the impression that a lot of local media outlets were giving,” she said.

Asked about the apparent contradiction between the new strategy and the drastic cuts at VOA and sibling U.S. government broadcasters, the White House pivoted to a defense of its overall record on counterterrorism.

Spokeswoman Olivia Wales pointed to the killing of the mastermind behind a 2021 bombing in Afghanistan that killed over 180 people, and to a crackdown on “Jihadist sympathizers,” cartels and gangs.

“The President has accomplished all of this while delivering on his mandate from the American people to make the federal government more efficient for hardworking American taxpayers,” Wales said by email. “Under President Trump’s leadership, terrorists of any kind will not be able to find safe harbor within our borders or attack Americans from abroad.”

VOA’S roots 

The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration created VOA in 1942 to fight Nazi propaganda during World War II. By the time Trump began his second term in January 2025, the agency was broadcasting in 49 languages with over 1,200 staffers in the U.S. and abroad.

Weeks after his return to office, Trump named Kari Lake to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, of which VOA is part, and directed her to largely dismantle it.

Over the next few months, Lake – a former Phoenix news anchor who lost races for Arizona governor in 2022 and senator in 2024 – tried to fire nearly all of the broadcaster’s staff. Courts blocked the firings. Lawsuits are ongoing. Nearly all USAGM employees remain locked out and on paid leave.

As of August 2025, according to the #SaveVOA website, a skeleton staff of roughly 54 was broadcasting in three languages. 

Today, VOA produces content in six languages: Dari, Pashto, Farsi, Mandarin, Korean and Kurdish. It is unclear how many employees are currently working at the organization.

The White House announced May 11 that Trump has picked Lake to serve as ambassador to Jamaica, a post subject to Senate confirmation.

Countering ISIS-K

In Afghanistan, the propaganda arm of Islamic State Khorasan Province – ISKP, also known as ISIS-K – publishes a magazine called Voice of Khorasan in multiple languages to target Central Asian populations.

The outreach by the ISKP propaganda arm, Al-Azaim Media Foundation, helps recruit members and raise funding, according to a 2025 inspector general report on the Operation Enduring Sentinel counterterrorism mission begun after the U.S. withdrawal in 2021.

Throughout the region, al-Qaida uses propaganda to encourage terror attacks and emphasize the group’s doctrines, according to a September 2025 article from the Combating Terrorism Center in West Point, N.Y.

Al-Qaida has increased its propaganda efforts since the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, the article says.

Al-Qaida propaganda is disseminated via a decentralized network of official and unofficial outlets, according to the Combating Terrorism Center article. This system is resistant to efforts to moderate or take down digital content.

That makes disruptions to U.S. global broadcasting all the more problematic, said Kate Neeper, the USAGM director of strategy and performance assessment, who is also on paid leave.

“There’s just so many of this country’s adversaries that are really stepping into the void,” she said.

No more ‘unrivaled soft power’

Patsy Widakuswara, the VOA’s White House bureau chief and a lead plaintiff in a lawsuit aiming to overturn the cuts Lake implemented, said the Sept. 11 attacks and U.S. invasion of Afghanistan led VOA to create programming that would counter violent extremism.

“We believe that this kind of programming would reduce the tendencies amongst the population that we broadcast to to commit violent extremism,” she said.

She pointed to the Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released in November, which called for furthering U.S. interests via “soft power.”

That’s something VOA has been doing since it was established, Widakuswara said.

“We’re both an instrument of American soft power and also … an organization that supports and upholds independent journalism,” she said. “They’re not mutually exclusive.”

A Biden-era report from the State Department in 2024 affirmed the key role USAGM plays in U.S. efforts to combat extremism overseas: “USAGM networks demonstrate American values to the world, core among them –freedom, transparency, accountability, and equality of opportunity. Societies that embrace these values are more likely to support U.S. interests because they tend to enjoy greater stability and prosperity, are less vulnerable to terrorism and extremism, and make better political allies and trade partners.”

Council on Foreign Relations President Michael Froman has also chastised the Trump administration for effectively shuttering VOA.

“Consider the stated need for the United States to have ‘unrivaled soft power,’” he wrote in December after the NSS was issued. “Yet, the administration has dramatically reduced foreign development assistance and shuttered the operations of the long-time broadcaster Voice of America without really standing up alternative means of exercising soft power.”

According to a 2023 USAGM fact sheet on countering violent extremism, the broadcaster directly worked to fight misinformation and propaganda. Among the groups USAGM said it countered were al-Qaida, the Islamic State group and the Taliban.

VOA’s charter requires the broadcaster to produce “accurate, objective, and comprehensive” news. That, Widakuswara said, allows it to build trust with audiences and support democracy around the world.

Widakuswara acknowledged that it’s impossible to prove a correlation between VOA broadcasting and the prevention of radicalization. But she said, “We do know that people who enjoy good information, who have access to good information, who have good access to journalism, then they have a broader view of the world.”

Amid the uproar over USAGM cuts, Lisa Curtis, director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, warned Congress that Lake’s efforts to defund Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, another broadcaster overseen by USAGM, would pave the way for expansion of terrorist movements.

She urged lawmakers to continue funding for programming she said had made inroads both covering and preventing radicalization in Central Asia.

“Without RFE/RL’s continued service, the U.S. government will lose valuable insight and reporting in areas where terrorist threats are emanating,” Curtis said in written testimony to a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee in May 2025.

Neeper said the agency’s broadcasters offered accessible and objective coverage of issues affecting communities around the world. VOA’s work in Afghanistan was especially strong, she said.

“We were trying to put more information into the marketplace and give people an alternative to those extremist-controlled platforms, which are incredibly pervasive in some parts of the world,” Neeper said.

Impact of dismantling USAGM

USAGM was created by Congress as an independent agency that oversees news and broadcasting networks serving countries with limited press freedom. By law, the networks under USAGM operate with editorial independence.

That firewall didn’t stop Lake from effectively dismantling VOA and attempting to do the same to RFE/RL in March 2025. Around the world, VOA programming went dark after staff was placed on leave.

Under Lake, USAGM tried to terminate its grant agreement with RFE/RL. Courts blocked that, and RFE/RL continues to provide coverage to South and Central Asia, with a reduced staff.

Foes have exploited the vacuum, Neeper said, noting that extremist groups and states like Iran, Russia and China have taken over broadcasting frequencies and relationships with stations to push their propaganda.

“Our adversaries fund these things very well,” she said.

Other VOA employees also view the cuts as disconcerting.

“If there is a game being played, but your team is absent from that game, there is no chance that you can win that game, not even the chance that you can draw,” Tanzeem said. “You at least have to be in the game.”

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