Trump’s Crackdown on Crucial Agency Just Got Really Grim

Donald Trump’s recent spate of crackdowns and reshuffling at the Voice of America reveal the administration’s plan to transform the award-winning newsroom into a MAGA propaganda machine.

VOA’s chief national correspondent, Steve Herman, was placed under investigation last week, for allegedly expressing political bias against the Trump administration in his social media posts, according to The New York Times.

A memo sent to Herman listed a swath of reasons he’d come under scrutiny. One of the reasons cited is Trump’s executive order titled “One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations,” which includes the provision that “failure to faithfully implement the President’s policy is grounds for professional discipline, including separation.”

Herman said he has been placed under a paid “excused absence” and expects to lose his job, according to NPR.

This isn’t the first time Herman has been the subject of this kind of investigation: He was the subject of a probe about the same supposed issue during the last year of Trump’s first administration. That time, leadership at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, which oversees VOA, had claimed that Herman’s posts relaying criticism of Trump betrayed a political bias. A federal judge found that former USAGM CEO Michael Pack had violated journalists’ First Amendment rights by interfering with VOA.

By comparison, this probe is coming directly from VOA’s acting senior program director, John Featherly, with the approval of VOA’s director, Michael Abramowitz, a Biden-era figure. But again, the probe specifically cites Herman’s engagement with social media posts regarding the second Trump administration’s trove of controversies.

Crucially, Herman himself is not expressing any attitudes, only sharing perspectives critical of the Trump administration—not atypical for a journalist.

At the same time, VOA moved its White House bureau chief, Patsy Widakuswara, who has 27 years of experience, to another beat. Journalists at VOA told NPR that no rationale was given for the reshuffling.

That wasn’t the only shakeup at VOA last week.

Former TV anchor turned failed MAGA Senate candidate Kari Lake was made a special adviser at VOA, pending her confirmation to run the agency. Trump’s pick to head USAGM, Brent Bozell III, needs to be confirmed before Lake can formally take the reins from Abramowitz.

Lake has alleged liberal bias at VOA but promised that the agency “won’t become Trump TV.”

In an email announcing her appointment, USAGM’s chief, Roman Napoli, wrote that Lake’s experience “will be invaluable as we continue our mission to clearly and effectively present the policies of the Trump Administration around the world.”

As Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, pointed out in a series of posts on X Monday, “That is NOT the assignment that Congress gave USAGM.” Rather, the mission statement of USAGM, which is codified into U.S. law, is to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”

Herman’s likely dismissal and Widakuswara’s reassignment are “having a chilling effect on the entire institution,” one VOA staffer said, according to Stelter.

Some staffers believe that the changes are part of management’s efforts to obey in advance of true scrutiny from the Trump administration, Stelter reported. And apparently, it’s been going on for a while. “Four sources told CNN on condition of anonymity that multiple Trump-related stories have been watered down in recent months,” Stelter wrote.

A group of centrist Democrats is being mocked and criticized for their new strategy to defeat Donald Trump and Republicans.

Earlier this month, the centrist think tank Third Way gathered the group, which included Democratic consultants, campaign staffers, elected officials, and party leaders, in Loudoun County, Virginia, to come up with a game plan on how to return to relevancy, Politico reports. But the resulting conclusions seemed way off base.

For example, among the 20 solutions suggested for the party were to “embrace patriotism, community, and traditional American imagery”; ban “far-left candidate questionnaires and refuse to participate in forums that create ideological purity tests”; and push “back against far-left staffers and groups that exert a disproportionate influence on policy and messaging.”

The plan also included a proposal to “move away from the dominance of small-dollar donors whose preferences may not align with the broader electorate,” which would seem to reject the money of many working-class donors and elevate billionaires and millionaires at a time when the Trump administration is being criticized as a wealthy oligarchy.

When Politico published its report on Sunday, the findings were immediately torn apart on social media.

One commentator pointed out that if Democrats were going to be rejecting small-dollar donors, they would shift toward wealthier campaign contributors coming from corporate sources.

The irony of meeting in Loudoun County, a wealthy Washington, D.C. suburb in northern Virginia, while concluding that candidates should “get out of elite circles and into real communities (e.g., tailgates, gun shows, local restaurants, churches)” was not lost on at least one critic.

None of the conclusions seem to really get at what has worked for Democrats in the past or reinforce what popular Democrats, such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are doing right now. Democrats need to go back to their working-class roots to win back working-class voters, and unsurprisingly, a meeting of party elites in a rich locale isn’t going to yield any solutions on how to do that.

U.S. Agency for International Development acting assistant administrator Nicholas Enrich—who was placed on administrative leave for writing two damning memos regarding the agency’s recent failure to provide lifesaving international aid in the midst of Marco Rubio’s program freeze—was about to publish a third. And it’s even worse than the rest, according to The Bulwark.

In his first memo, Enrich described severe staff reductions, from 783 positions to 69, and in his second, he noted that 72 different USAID activities had no funding, leading to a death toll that is “not known.” But in his third memo, Enrich estimates how many people will die or get deadly diseases as a result of the cuts.

The memo notes that a permanent halt of $7.7 billion in aid could lead to “12.5–17.9 million cases of malaria with an additional 71,000–166,000 deaths annually,” “a 28 to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally,” “an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year,” and in a potential worst-case scenario, over “28,000 cases of Ebola, Marburg, or related diseases,” according to The Bulwark’s summary.

These programs are much more critical than the Trump administration would have the public believe, as it peddles false conspiracy theories about USAID like the agency providing condoms for Hamas.

Enrich went on to write that potentially 17 million pregnant women would lose access to lifesaving services, more than 11 million newborns would go without postnatal care, and about one million children would not receive treatment for severe acute malnutrition.

“Weakened disease surveillance doesn’t only jeopardize natural outbreak detection—it also creates openings for malicious actors,” he wrote. “Global health monitoring systems serve as the ‘smoke alarm’ for unusual disease patterns that could signal a bioterrorism event. If those alarms are switched off or muted due to lack of funding, a deliberate release of a pathogen could spread for weeks under the guise of a normal outbreak.”

Sources close to Enrich told The Bulwark that he knew publishing the memos would be career suicide. And while this memo is a crucial look into what is actually being lost in these cuts, it’s likely Trump will never lay eyes on it.

Protesters plagued Vice President JD Vance’s vacation over the weekend, calling out the second-highest-ranking executive branch leader for the administration’s catastrophic agenda.

Vance was less than welcome during a family ski trip to Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort on Saturday, as hundreds of protesters gathered to express their outrage at the official and his connection to the Trump administration.

Demonstrators lining the streets in Waitsfield lamented the administration’s aggressive anti-immigration agenda, while others argued that the country “is in serious trouble” under Trump’s leadership.

“Our democracy is at risk, and we have people who don’t care about people,” Terry Bambrick from Richmond, Vermont, told the crowd, reported NBC 5.

A smattering of signage posted online captured the local resentment: “Proud of Mad River Valley, Disgusted by This Administration”; “SHAME”; “Go fuck a couch, not my country”; “Support your local co-op, not this fkn coup”; “bully JD Vance, go away.”

Shops and storefronts in the area also participated in the protest, placing signage out front to inform the vice president that he would receive no service in the Green Mountain State.

“Sorry VP, sold out,” read a sign outside of Mad River Glen in Waitsfield.

“Vance? We thought Elon was VP,” read a sign posted on the sidewalk.

Others turned out to express their horror that the vice president had bombed a potential peace talk between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy on Friday, escalating tensions and instigating conflict between the two presidents by claiming that the Ukrainian leader had not been grateful for U.S. aid.

One demonstrator held up a sign that said, “Vance is a traitor” who should “go ski in Russia.”

As Vance departed on Sunday back to Washington, one local, Tommy Lovegood, had a message for the vice president: “This is Vermont. You don’t belong here,” Lovegood told NBC 5.

Elon Musk’s latest futile foray to get federal workers to spill about their week at work has seriously started to annoy members of Donald Trump’s own Cabinet, The Washington Post reported Monday.

Government workers began to receive a wave of emails Friday with the subject “What did you do last week? Part II,” the sequel to Musk’s ineffectual accomplishment email from the week before. Once again, the emails appeared to come from an account linked to human resources at the Office of Personnel Management, and prompted workers to respond by the end of the day Monday “each week,” copying their managers on their responses.

As soon as the emails began to arrive so did instructions from department heads—prompting workers to ignore the email.

At the Department of Energy, one official told staff not to respond to any emails prompting them to list their accomplishments. Employees told the Post that even their Trump-appointed leadership had grown weary of the Department of Government Efficiency’s tedious directives, as the agency was already enacting Trump’s sweeping agenda to boost fossil fuel production in the face of his so-called “national energy emergency.”

In addition to Musk’s emails, agencies have already been dealing with DOGE’s recommendations to implement massive layoffs. Earlier this month, the DOE laid off between 1,200 and 2,000 of its roughly 14,000 employees as part of DOGE’s government-wide purge of federal workers.

One DOE employee told the Post that the emails represented a “power struggle” between DOGE and federal agencies. Another suggested that the emails were designed to unnerve federal workers.

“It does give off ‘psychological warfare’ vibes to send these when they know folks would be heading to bed, or cooking dinner, on weekends in particular,” the employee said.

At the State Department, Undersecretary for Management Tibor P. Nagy sent out an email to employees assuring them that management would “respond on the behalf of our workforce,” according to an email obtained by the Post. At least one ambassador also sent out instructions to ignore Musk’s demand.

Once again, Musk insisted on social media that responding to his “pulse check” email was “mandatory for the executive branch.”

But, in the end, it seems like Musk’s email just isn’t good for efficiency.

One employee at the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that if two million federal employees spent 15 minutes responding to emails, at their average wage of $35 per hour, they would ultimately waste 500,000 hours and cost the government $17.5 million.

“That’s a conservative estimate,” the employee told the Post. “There are more than two million feds, and most of us spent way more than 15 minutes between trying to figure out what it meant, meetings about whether to respond or not and actually writing the email.”

The employee also pointed out that many federal employees already write reports on their weekly accomplishments, and that Musk’s redundancy-hunting email was ultimately redundant itself.

The Trump administration might exclude government spending from gross domestic product reports to cover up upcoming poor economic reports, and to hide the true scope of Department of Government Efficiency cuts.

In an interview on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures over the weekend, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was asked whether the massive cuts spurred by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative could have a negative impact on the economy.

Lutnick’s response was to cast doubt on GDP reports and announce a change.

“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”

This would present an inaccurate picture of the U.S. economy and complicate what is considered a measuring tool for the country’s economic health. Government actions impact the economy in many ways, from deficits and regulations, to tax and spending changes. With DOGE actions resulting in many federal workers losing their jobs, and more layoffs on the horizon, these ex-employees will be reducing their spending, which will have ripple effects on the economy.

Lutnick appears to be repeating what Musk posted on X on Friday. The tech mogul/fascism enthusiast also attacked how the GDP is measured, claiming that “a more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending.”

“Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better,” Musk’s post added.

Musk was corrected by his own Community Notes feature on X, which pointed out that the government already has a report measuring GDP excluding government spending called “Value Added by Private Industries” that accounts for 88.7 percent of American GDP.

All of this seems to indicate that Musk, Lutnick, and the rest of the Trump administration are worried that the coming economic reports are going to look very bad and reflect poorly on the new president. So, they are attempting to discredit the numbers and try to juke the stats to make themselves look good. But that won’t change the real economic ripple effects of their decisions, as well as the lost jobs and less consumer spending, which voters won’t be quiet about.

On Sunday, President Trump announced his plans for a U.S. “crypto strategic reserve,” stating that he’d make the country the “Crypto Capital of the World.” But a closer look reveals the reserve may be nothing but a blatant insider trading scam to make his billionaire crypto czar richer—funded by taxpayer money.

Trump announced that he plans to add five cryptocurrencies to the strategic reserve: Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana, and Cardano. Not so coincidentally, his crypto czar David Sacks has a venture firm linked to Bitwise Invests, one of the biggest crypto index fund providers. Bitwise holds significant amounts of the very same cryptocurrencies. Sacks promised that he sold his personal, direct holdings, but made no mention of his multiple indirect holdings.

If this wasn’t enough, just a few hours before Trump’s announcement, someone bought $200 million in Ethereum and Bitcoin, raising the question of who may have known about the plan ahead of time.

Sacks, for his part, has denied the claims of his indirect holdings, instead insisting that they are a farce. “I had a $74k position in the Bitwise ETF which I sold on January 22. I do not have ‘large indirect holdings,’” Sacks said. “I’ll provide an update at the end of the ethics process.”

Sacks is set to chair a first annual crypto summit at the White House on Friday.

Another former adviser to Donald Trump has called him out for bowing to Russia in his Ukraine peace deal, and the president does not seem to be handling it very well.

“H.R. MCMASTER IS A WEAK AND TOTALLY INEFFECTIVE LOSER!” Trump posted to his social media platform Truth Social late Sunday.

“We should spend less time worrying about Putin, and more time worrying about migrant rape gangs, drug lords, murderers, and people from mental institutions entering our Country—So that we don’t end up like Europe!” Trump wrote in a separate post.

In another post early Monday, Trump claimed that he was “the only president who gave none of Ukraine’s land to Putin’s Russia,” despite the fact that the deal cooked up by his administration thus far would fail to return Ukraine to its prewar borders.

The commentary on his first term national security adviser followed a 60 Minutes interview in which McMaster spoke on Trump’s excruciating meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. On Friday, Trump and Vice President JD Vance overtly showed where their loyalties lie: Seated in front of the press in the White House, the pair refused to let Zelenskiy speak, allowed a conservative reporter to mock Zelenskiy’s wartime attire, and effectively leveraged the critical meeting for measly political gain by defending Russian President Vladimir Putin at the cost of denigrating former U.S. officials. And in doing so, they challenged America’s strongest alliances while ceding the world stage to its adversaries.

The lack of diplomacy derailed peace negotiations and prematurely concluded Zelenskiy’s visit, before the Ukrainian leader had a chance to sign a rare earth minerals deal that would have been a boon for America’s tech industry.

“Vladimir Putin couldn’t be happier,” McMaster told CBS, sizing up the events of the day. “Because what he sees is all of the pressure on Zelenskiy, all of the pressure on Ukraine, and no pressure on him.”

McMaster noted that Putin is a “master manipulator” with a deep understanding of how to work Trump to Russia’s advantage.

“He appeals to President Trump’s sense of aggrievement,” McMaster said. “And he’s been very successful at it because he’s a master manipulator and one of the best liars in the world.”

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine.

The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia last month, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership.

Donald Trump was roasted at the 97th Academy Awards ceremony Sunday night for his close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Anora is having a good night,” said host Conan O’Brien, referring to Sean Baker’s film, which had already picked up awards for screenwriting and editing, and would go on to win Best Actress and Best Picture.

“Yeah, that’s great, that’s great news. Two wins already. I guess Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian,” O’Brien joked. The audience erupted into astonished laughter, before breaking into loud cheering and applause.

O’Brien’s joke comes just days after Trump and Vice President JD Vance detonated a metaphorical bomb during their meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, disgracefully demanding that the wartime president thank them for aid they didn’t even approve, which they are anxious to see returns on.

“He can come back when he is ready for Peace,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Friday, after readily undermining efforts to end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Trump’s little performance Friday won’t win any awards, but it has likely delighted the audience in Moscow.

As the White House cracks down on which news outlets are allowed to have access to President Donald Trump, it seems that a member of Russian state media was somehow able to make their way into the Oval Office Friday.

While mainstream outlets the Associated Press and Reuters were kept out of a tense discussion between Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a member of Tass, a Russian news agency that pushes propaganda about Russia’s “liberation” of Ukraine, was briefly in the room with the two world leaders.

A White House official told Politico that Tass was “not on the approved list of media” for the day’s press pool.

“As soon as it came to the attention of press office staff that he was in the Oval, he was escorted out by the Press Secretary,” the official said, adding that the reporter wasn’t on the list of the now-canceled press conference after, either.

The White House did not explain how the reporter was able to gain access to the Oval Office, despite not being on the list for entry.

Earlier this week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced that the White House would determine members of the press pool, leaving it to craft its own unit of propagandists and shutting out the White House Correspondents’ Association. The change in the rules comes after the Trump administration was sued for revoking the Associated Press’s access, over the wire’s unwillingness to pretend the Gulf of Mexico is called the “Gulf of America.”

Trump has increasingly aligned himself with Russian President Vladimir Putin, echoing Moscow’s rhetoric criticizing Ukraine and its leader, and mounting an all-out detonation during their meeting Friday.