Recent articles by Marc Thiessen and Anne Applebaum have heavily criticized Kari Lake, the former Arizona GOP Senate candidate who is now CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. They say she has broken that agency. Thiessen, in particular, argues that Lake’s actions have greatly weakened U.S. messaging to the Iranian people amid looming conflict. Lake says otherwise — that she was simply doing what the president tasked her to do.
Still, this disagreement encapsulates the tensions between President Donald Trump’s domestic and foreign policy agendas.
In a March 2025 executive order, Trump directed cuts to perceived waste and anti-Trump bias within USAGM supervising organizations such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. When Lake became CEO last July, she didn’t hesitate, quickly taking a sword to the heart of these agencies by slashing their workforces and operations to the bone. This earned praise among Make America Great Again supporters and bolstered Lake’s credentials as a Trump loyalist. As Trump put it in late 2025, “Kari is doing a fantastic job cleaning up a mess that has existed for decades. She is finally putting America First on the world stage.”
When Trump launched strikes against Iran’s nuclear program in June 2025, however, the cost of these cuts became apparent.
Having laid off the majority of its Iran-related journalists, RFE/RL was unable to broadcast U.S. messaging into Iran effectively. While Lake recalled some staff on a temporary basis, critics say this was inadequate for the scale necessary. A similar situation developed in January 2026, as hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets to protest collapsing living standards. Perhaps more than 10,000 protesters were slaughtered by the regime in a breach of a red line set by Trump. And with Trump now preparing to order likely imminent military action against Iran, critics of Lake say RFE/RL remains in a poor position to report from the country.
As one source with direct knowledge of Lake’s cuts told the Washington Examiner, “We were crippled. This could have been done so much better if we hadn’t just destroyed it … You’ve broken it, you can’t just throw it back together.” The source added that USAGM outlets had “lost reliability, lost credibility” with Iranians who could no longer rely on their coverage. A separate person with direct knowledge asserted that USAGM had “unlawfully withheld” funds appropriated to the Open Technology Fund, a nonprofit organization that provides virtual private network access to allow Iranians to skirt government censors. This meant, this source said, that “for nine months, the Open Technology Fund was completely hamstrung and off the field.” When Thiessen asked about this VPN concern, Lake blamed the State Department.
Speaking to the Washington Examiner, Lake vehemently rejected these criticisms. Defending her mandate from Trump, she argued that “we need to trim back our government. The agencies have grown out of control.” Her reforms were needed, she said, to stop these agencies from “being abusive of the American taxpayer.” USAGM, she argued, is now doing the “best work that we’ve ever done.”
Much of the criticism has focused on Lake’s order to RFE/RL not to use a Kuwait-based transmitting station to broadcast into Iran. Lake appeared to suggest to Thiessen that the station was inoperable for technical reasons, though she clarified to the Washington Examiner that she meant it was inoperable because she had ordered it not to be used by RFE/RL. Lake says her priority was ensuring the alignment between Iran-related messaging and Trump administration policy. She insisted that there were “other ways” Iranians were able to access USAGM coverage outside of the Kuwait station, though her critics insist that the station is instrumental to defeating Iranian jamming efforts. When asked what these “other ways” were, Lake simply suggested Iranians were “very savvy.”
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It bears noting that Lake’s cuts have made her an obvious magnet for criticism. Asked about the possible partisan motives of some of her critics, Lake responded, “The attacks on me are 100% partisan. We’ve had to trim down the size of our government.” Put bluntly, Trump’s spending cuts have cost people their jobs and others their priority missions. Many government employees would prefer a return to the Biden administration’s more deferential policies toward the federal workforce.
Still, as the multi-decade-long U.S.-Iran crisis reaches a perhaps unprecedented tipping point, this USAGM controversy illustrates the deeper tension between domestic Trump’s interests in spending cuts and his increasingly forceful foreign policy agenda.