Radio Free Asia will stop publishing amid funding crisis spurred by Trump

“Since she arrived at USAGM, Ms. Lake has not spent a single minute with us or our senior teams,” Fang, along with RFE/RL and MBN heads Stephen Capus and Jeffrey Gedmin, wrote in a letter to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in June. “Simply put, Ms. Lake has shown not one iota of interest in our content; nor has she asked us about our plans for reform, restructure, and improvement.”

In response, Lake told committee members that she had not managed to meet with the outlets before they filed their lawsuits and would not meet with them while legal proceedings were underway.

But RFA, known for its investigative reporting on post-coup Myanmar and Uyghur persecution in China, still had to make deep cuts to its ranks given the uncertainty of future funding. In May, the organization said it was laying off 280 staffers in the United States — 80 percent of its domestic workforce — and 20 overseas.

“This announcement from RFA is due – entirely – to the lapse in appropriations and closure of the US government,” Lake wrote in a statement. “The President has called on Congress to pass a clean [continuing resolution] to resume funding to the government, which would address this problem.”

“What exactly is RFA doing with the tens-of-millions of American taxpayer dollars that USAGM has disbursed to them?” she added. “We have paid them every penny of their fiscal year 2025 allocation, so why are they laying off employees and ceasing publication?” Lake also said congressional Democrats deserve blame for the government shutdown and thus the funding crisis for RFA.

Amid its funding crisis, RFA has continued to publish articles but at a much less frequent clip than in prior years. In May, it stopped broadcasting and shuttered its Uyghur- and Tibetan-language services, but continued to publish online in Burmese, Khmer, Korean, Mandarin and Vietnamese until now.

Washington has long viewed its government-funded broadcasters — which operate independently but rely on federal dollars — as purveyors of geopolitical soft power, with the idea that offering free information can boost American influence and democratic ideals in countries where it can be dangerous to report the news.

Cambodia’s authoritarian former prime minister, Hun Sen, publicly thanked the Trump administration in March for shutting down RFA and Voice of America, calling the move “a major contribution to eliminating fake news, disinformation, lies, distortions, incitement, and chaos around the world.”

Chinese state media has also cheered Trump’s efforts. The Washington Post previously reported that the Chinese government has added radio frequencies to broadcast state-run media in the months since RFA started to decline.

“However drastic these measures may seem, they position RFA, a private corporation, for a future in which it would be possible to scale up and resume providing accurate, uncensored news for people living in some of the world’s most closed places,” Fang said.