Trump Defunds Radio Free Europe After 75 Years, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That People Living Under Dictators Could Still Hear The News

WASHINGTON. The Trump administration moved Saturday to terminate the federal grant funding Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, ending 75 years of uncensored American broadcasting into closed societies and resolving a long-standing concern that citizens living under authoritarian governments could still occasionally find out what was happening in their own countries.

The termination, delivered to the congressionally funded broadcaster one day after an executive order directing the U.S. Agency for Global Media to reduce itself to the minimum required by law, cut off an outlet that since 1950 has reported in roughly two dozen languages to audiences in Russia, Belarus, Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, frequently to people for whom it is the only available source of news not written by their own government. Administration officials characterized the decision as a routine act of fiscal discipline, observing that the roughly $140 million involved was a modest sum to stop spending.

"For decades the United States paid good money to make sure people in dictatorships had accurate, independent information, and at no point did anyone stop to ask whether that was really our problem," said one official, speaking on condition of anonymity because the reasoning holds together better that way. "These are sovereign nations with perfectly good state media of their own. Who are we to compete."

The move was welcomed warmly abroad, where broadcasters in Moscow described the defunding as a long-overdue correction and several governments that had spent years jamming the network's signal and prosecuting its journalists expressed quiet satisfaction at having the matter settled in Washington rather than at home. A federal judge later ordered the funding restored, ruling that the executive branch could not unilaterally cancel money Congress had already appropriated, a finding the administration received as a helpful scheduling suggestion.

Officials stressed that the broadcaster's reporters, including the ones presently imprisoned in the very countries they cover, would retain full freedom to seek other employment.

At press time, the administration had identified Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and the remaining channels by which the outside world reaches the inside of a dictatorship as the next long-standing concerns scheduled for resolution.