“The mission of United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) is to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy. However, this mission statement does not reflect the current work of the agency. The mission is noble, but the execution is lacking. To fulfill its mission, USAGM should also aim to present the truth about America and American policy – not parrot America’s adversaries’ propaganda and talking points.” (Project 2025, Section 2.5; Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media, Mora Namdar, page 267, paragraph 1).

For context, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) is an independent federal agency that oversees the United States’ international media efforts. It manages government-funded news outlets such as Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia (RFA), Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), and Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB). These outlets aim to provide unbiased news, promote freedom of the press, and support democratic values in regions where free media is restricted or censored.

USAGM’s coverage focuses on providing reliable news and information to audiences in authoritarian or conflict-ridden countries, promoting democratic ideals, and countering disinformation. Their content includes topics related to politics, human rights, governance, and global events.

So she’s not referring here to the messaging that we’re providing Americans or to corporate mass media, she’s referring to the manufactured messaging that we provide to countries without a free press. She does go on to accuse VOA of exposing “flagrantly political content” to Americans, calling them “biased” and “suffering from poor leadership.” She goes on to explain what each broadcasting office does, and what their weak points are. The “flagrantly political content” she’s referring to was a video of Joe Biden addressing Muslim-Americans¹⁵ which was aired by VOA Urdu, in the Urdu language. I’m guessing not many Americans saw that. But the video was forwarded to VOA by pro-Trump groups, and their Pro-Trump CEO, Michael Pack, was outraged by it. More about him below. They argued that since Joe Biden urges Muslim-Americans to vote for him in the video, that showing it was the VOA “trying to influence the election”, even though the video wasn’t shown in America (or indeed, even in English.)

“Late in the Trump Administration, following the long-delayed Senate confirmation of Michael Pack as USAGM Chief Executive Officer (CEO), agency leadership rapidly initiated long-overdue and necessary reforms, including security reforms repeatedly requested by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that had been ignored by USAGM leadership. Unfortunately, as was the case with the OTF, the Biden Administration immediately reinstated personnel who had been fired for gross security violations, placing the agency back into its previously failed posture—one that poses a danger to national security.” (Project 2025, Section 2.5; Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media, Mora Namdar, page 271, paragraph 2).

She’s claiming here that Pack was finally cleaning up the USAGM, and Biden reversed those efforts. The reality is that Pack attempted to purge the organization of career officials, censor any criticisms of President Trump, and withhold congressionally appropriated funding from a subsidiary of the media organization. [Source]¹. From the linked article:

“Pack’s moves have continued to stoke fear over the White House’s mismanagement and attempted politicization of the federal agency intended to promote independent and credible journalism.”

Pack was accused three times in the same week² of fraud and misuse of his office. One of the charges, from the AG of the District of Columbia, accused Pack of illegally funneling more than $4 million dollars to himself through a nonprofit that he also controls. From the linked article:

“Pack has thrust his agency on a path of tumult, pursuing an agenda that appears to prize loyalty to President Trump and his policies over the values that, by law, the federal broadcasters are supposed to espouse.”

Despite all of his legal troubles, Pack (who, it must be noted, was not qualified for his position as the CEO of Voice of America – he was formerly a conservative documentary filmmaker), persisted in a “final purge”³ of USAGM employees before Biden took office.

Basically, Pack was a Trump loyalist who censored the news to Trump’s liking. As for Biden reversing the purge, Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike condemned the firings⁴, and on July 21, 2020, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued an emergency injunction to block Pack’s staffing changes at the OTF. The court ruled that the OTF board replacements were invalid and warned that, absent an injunction, the “OTF faces an increasing risk that its decision-making will be taken over by the government, that it will suffer reputational harm, and that it will lose the ability to effectively operate.”

So Namdar is grossly misrepresenting what happened and why, and, in her defense of Pack, is defending a fraud and a criminal who censored the press to placate another fraud and criminal (are we surprised?)

“Even content that went well beyond fair and accurate reporting on U.S. domestic and political problems could not be reined in by front office leadership under the Firewall Regulation. Soon, VOA’s White House correspondent was posting content highly critical of, and personally insulting to, the U.S. President—in contradiction of VOA’s own journalistic standards, policies, and procedures.” (Project 2025, Section 2.5; Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media, Mora Namdar, page 271, paragraph 6).

Namdar gives no examples of these critical and “personally insulting” news stories, but I feel it’s necessary to point out that when a President commits crimes, or says something disgusting about women or veterans, or tells any of the literally more than thirty thousand documented lies⁵ Trump told during his presidency, that’s newsworthy and something we the people (and the press) SHOULD be critical about, regardless of whether or not the president finds it “personally insulting.” 

Namdar is arguing for a system where nobody is allowed to criticize Dear Leader. This is fascism. She goes on for several paragraphs, outraged that the media would dare criticize Trump or his staff. In fact, Vice President Pence’s office threatened reporter Steve Herman with retaliation⁶ for accurately reporting that Pence visited the Mayo clinic without wearing a mask, which was explicitly against their rules at the time (there is photographic evidence of this.)

“In brief, the USAGM is vulnerable to exploitation by foreign spies. During the last six months of the Trump Administration, known foreign intelligence operatives were removed from the OCB and RFE/RL.” (Project 2025, Section 2.5; Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media, Mora Namdar, page 273, paragraph 2).

This is another lie. What she’s referring to is Michael Pack’s accusations that the USAGM was “ripe for espionage, and possibly rife with spies.”⁷ “It’s a great place to put a foreign spy,” Pack said, citing what he contended were severe security lapses by previous leadership.

From the linked article:

“Pack’s insistence that there were issues related to security in hiring at VOA is merely a smokescreen to avert attention from his blatant attempt to interfere with the legislatively mandated independence, or ‘firewall’, protecting the journalists of VOA from government interference,” said former USAGM CEO John Lansing. Lansing is now the CEO of NPR.”

I could find no real record of actual spies who were removed from the USAGM for any kind of “spying” activities. Said NPR:

“Pack’s seven-month tenure offered a near-perfect encapsulation of Trumpism. Once confirmed by the Senate, Pack announced his charge was “to drain the swamp, to root out corruption, and to deal with these issues of [anti-Trump] bias,” as he put it on The Federalist Radio Hour, a conservative podcast. Pack obsessed over staff loyalty, embraced conspiracy theories and refused to allow visa extensions for his foreign journalists.

In short, he proceeded to wage ideological warfare on his own agency.

“I don’t think he had a plan other than to just blow the place up,” Hanlon now says.” [Source]⁸

“There is great concern about the vulnerability of undersea cable trunks that make up the Internet cloud. The vast majority of global Internet traffic — 95 percent — is transmitted through these cables, including news transmissions and Presidential Transition Project web-based content produced by the USAGM’s broadcast networks.” (Project 2025, Section 2.5; Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media, Mora Namdar, pages 274 and 275).

That the cables “make up the internet cloud” is inaccurate. The cables carry information, they don’t store it. It’s also not news that these cables are vulnerable. They experience about 200 outages a year⁹ and the vast majority of these are human-caused (mostly by fishing equipment or anchors). The reason we don’t hear about the outages is that there is almost always a backup route of transmitting information, especially for crucial infrastructure. From the linked article:

“The threat of these vulnerabilities being exploited is growing. A successful attack would deal a crippling blow to Britain’s security and prosperity.”

However, with more than 50 cables connected to the UK alone, Clatterbuck was skeptical about how useful a deliberate outage could be in a time of war, pointing to the level of coordination and resources required to cut multiple cables at once.

“If you wanted to sabotage the global internet or cut off a particular place you’d have to do it simultaneously on multiple cables,” he said. “You’d be focusing on the hardest aspect of disrupting a network.”

In short, there are literally dozens of more effective ways to take down a network that don’t involve physically severing undersea cables. A would-be saboteur isn’t likely to select the absolute most difficult way of carrying out their mission.

“It would likely be easier to target onshore internet infrastructure with cyber and DDoS attacks, flooding the network and knocking key facilities offline. Though even then, Clatterbuck pointed out, military and other government organizations likely have satellite backups.”

Ways to protect the cables include strategic route planning to avoid known hazards and areas of geopolitical tension, establishing “cable protection zones” to limit high-risk activities near cables, and more. Namdar doesn’t suggest any of these things, merely points out that the cables would be vulnerable if we had a war, and suggests we use shortwave radios as backup.

“The VOA firewall is meant to protect broadcasters from government interference with content; however, USAGM staff have abused the firewall and used it as an offensive measure to block oversight.” (Project 2025, Section 2.5; Media Agencies: U.S. Agency for Global Media, Mora Namdar, page 276, paragraph 3).

Namdar is arguing here for government oversight (and of course manipulation) of the USAGM here (and explicitly states it in the previous paragraph.)

— Here is where Mora Namdar’s section ends, and Mike Gonzales’ section of this chapter begins —

Gonzales begins in his first few paragraphs a desire to cancel all government funding from public broadcasting (PBS, NPR, etc.), and replace them with a newly created government-funded and controlled broadcast system.

“Not only is the federal government trillions of dollars in debt and unable to afford the more than half a billion dollars squandered on leftist opinion each year, but the government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views.” (Project 2025, Section 2.5; Media Agencies: Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Mike Gonzales, page 278, paragraph 4).

Wow. You don’t get much clearer in your intentions than that statement. Defuding public broadcasting would result in a number of consequences including educational, cultural and local programming being reduced or canceled; small or rural stations being forced to close, leading to a loss of access to reliable information in underserved areas; public broadcasters might have to turn to commercialized funding to stay afloat, potentially leading to biased and commercial programming that appeals to advertisers rather than the public interest, huge impact on free access to information, and more.

Gonzales and his ilk, however, are not concerned with what is in the public interest. They are concerned with controlling the narrative. As Stephen Colbert deftly noted, “It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias.” Meaning, liberal talking points tend to be steeped in reality, and conservative talking points in an alternate reality of their own making. In truth, NPR and PBS are about the least biased news sources available. According to the Interactive Media Bias Chart¹⁰, NPR and PBS rank only very slightly left of center.

Now, it’s not a given that NPR and PBS (among others) would cease to exist if their federal funding was cut, but they’d certainly scramble to adjust, at best. Here’s some reading on that.¹¹

The Republicans’ current NPR outrage stems from a contentious and inaccurate¹² essay critiquing NPR, that was written by Uri Berliner, a disgruntled editor who erroneously claimed¹³ that NPR ignores conservative viewpoints. In reality, his complaints amounted to the same complaints that Dustin J. Carmack had in section 2.4, and I debunked those ideas there.

“PBS and NPR do not even bother to run programming that would attract conservatives.” (Project 2025, Section 2.5; Media Agencies: Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Mike Gonzales, page 278, paragraph 5).

That’s…an interesting admission. I guess no conservative child has ever benefited from Sesame Street or Mister Rogers. No conservative has ever enjoyed NOVA, Antiques Roadshow, or Austin City Limits. No conservatives like Downton Abbey or Poldark, or the Great British Baking Show. No conservative could possibly learn anything from NPR’s many news, financial, or cultural programs. Their disdain for science, art, humanity, culture, and education is on full display here.