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Over the weekend, amid spiraling headlines about the increasingly tentacular influence of Elon Musk and his minions within the federal government, CNN reported on an apparent showdown at the offices of the US Agency for International Development: staffers from Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE) tried to enter, apparently seeking access to sensitive information including personnel data and classified records, but were blocked from doing so; eventually, after threatening to call the US Marshals, they were admitted; afterward, two senior security officials at USAID were reportedly placed on leave. On Sunday, as speculation swirled that Musk and his allies were seeking to shut USAID down, Musk reposted a rough summary of CNN’s reporting with the caption “USAID is a criminal organization. Time for it to die”—part of a barrage of posts on X, the social platform that he owns, in which he also referred to the agency as “very corrupt,” “evil,” and “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.” Early Monday, on an X livestream with the Republican senator Joni Ernst and his short-lived DOGE-mate Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk claimed that he’d spoken with President Trump, who had agreed that USAID should be shuttered. The agency, Musk added, isn’t “an apple with a worm in it” but “a ball of worms.”
As yesterday wore on, the chaos only deepened. USAID staffers received an email—sent, it would seem, by one of a coterie of nineteen-to-twenty-four-year-old engineers recruited to DOGE by Musk (who has a Substack called The Weekly Byte)—telling them not to come to the office, the entrance to which was blocked by police officers and yellow tape; when Democratic members of Congress showed up to see what was going on and were denied entry, they instead addressed protesters who had amassed outside. (“We were told the office is closed and all employees were told just to telework, which I thought was illegal now,” Rep. Jamie Raskin said, referring to a recent Trump order cracking down on remote work.) Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, confirmed to reporters during a visit to El Salvador that he is now the acting administrator of USAID; CBS reported that the agency will continue to do humanitarian work, but will be folded into the State Department with a much-trimmed staff; critics said not so fast, since any reorganization would require congressional involvement. The offices will apparently be closed again today. The crisis continues.
On one level, this is just the latest in a string of whiplash-inducing stories about Trump’s—and, increasingly, Musk’s—efforts to ransack the federal government, which may or may not be legal, and whose confusing implementation may or may not be exactly the point. Already, though, the new administration’s approach to USAID has had sharp consequences all over the world—after taking office, Trump signed an order freezing virtually all American aid spending for ninety days, grinding dependent humanitarian operations to an immediate halt across a dizzying array of different project areas. Journalists have been among those affected: according to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the aid freeze appears to have put a hold on $268 million that was earmarked to fund “independent media and the free flow of information” this year. In the recent past, USAID had boasted of supporting more than six thousand journalists, around seven hundred independent newsrooms, and nearly three hundred media-focused civil society groups in thirty or so countries—and yet, RSF notes, the full impact of the freeze is hard to measure, since many recipients are “hesitant to draw attention for fear of risking long-term funding or coming under political attacks.”
News outlets that have been exiled from Iran and Belarus did tell RSF, under the cover of anonymity, that the freeze has forced them to take drastic measures just to survive, while DataCameroon, an investigative site, said that it had to suspend projects linked to journalist safety and upcoming elections in the country. RSF also noted the harsh effect on journalism in Ukraine, where 90 percent of news organizations rely on USAID funding, some very heavily; writing last week, Olga Rudenko, the editor in chief of the Kyiv Independent (which has received USAID grants in the past but doesn’t currently), claimed that the freeze “has caused harm to independent Ukrainian journalism on par with the COVID-19 pandemic and the onset of Russia’s full-scale war,” and could soon surpass both in severity if not reversed. There have been reports, too, of concrete effects on journalism from Moldova, Cambodia, and Myanmar; writing in the Indian publication Scroll, Nandita Haksar, the coauthor of a new book on the prominent Burmese newsroom Mizzima, reported that the freeze has plunged that outlet into uncertainty exactly four years on from a brutal coup that forced Myanmar’s independent media into exile or underground. (I reported on the impact of the coup for a forthcoming book that I’ve written about journalism, and found that it made the country’s surviving independent outlets highly dependent on international donor funding.)
USAID’s website has been offline since Saturday, but a surviving post under the agency’s profile on Medium, from around a year ago, is telling of its approach toward funding journalism overseas. The article states that “supporting independent media has been part of USAID’s democracy and governance assistance efforts since the 1980s” and that the US government “is now the largest public donor to independent media development globally,” above a graphic featuring a quote from President Biden describing press freedom as “the bedrock of democracy” and an outline of recent initiatives aimed not only at steering grants to journalists around the world, but also at helping them sustain themselves commercially and defending them against nuisance lawsuits. (There are also several references to the movie Barbie: “To paraphrase Dua Lipa” from the film, journalists “can take the heat, baby, best believe that’s the moment they shine. In doing so, however, as [then USAID administrator Samantha Power] noted in her World Press Freedom Day speech in May 2023, journalists shouldn’t have to deal with bankruptcy, bailiffs, or bullets.”)
The at least temporary loss of funding for this sort of thing may not be collateral damage from the new administration’s broader war on USAID, but a casus belli itself: amid his Sunday salvo of posts on X, Musk took aim at the agency for “paying media organizations to publish their propaganda” and reposted other claims to this effect. USAID has critics on the left, too, who see US efforts to “promote democracy” abroad, including through media funding, as ineffective liberal do-goodery at best and an insidious smoke screen at worst. (The former Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald posted on Sunday that USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy are “well-documented CIA fronts that are designed to manipulate other countries’ internal politics for the benefits of DC elites and nobody else in the US”; Musk responded: “They’re not even good at it.”) Writing for Drop Site News overnight, Ryan Grim, a former Intercept colleague of Greenwald’s, took a more nuanced view, noting that some of what USAID does “is worthy and important”—and calling some of Musk’s recent posts “truly moronic”—but arguing, ultimately, that the good work needn’t live within an agency “whose actual mission is to wield power in the domestic politics of our allies and adversaries alike.” USAID, Grim added, “is an omnipresent tool of American soft power.”
The latter claim, at least, is unambiguously true. And USAID funding to journalism around the world should of course be subject to scrutiny, both in terms of how it aligns with US foreign policy objectives in a general sense and also on a project-by-project basis. (Quite aside from any sweeping philosophical questions, I’ve heard repeatedly that international donor money doesn’t always go toward things that journalists on the ground actually want or need, sometimes being funneled into training sessions, for example, when direct cash assistance would be more helpful.) It is clear to me, though, that USAID and other arms of the US government have funded much good, hard-hitting journalism—work that does often align with its geopolitical interests, but is not conditioned on that. (The US has in recent years been a strong ally of Ukraine’s government, for example—but the Kyiv Independent’s Rudenko stressed last week that the past USAID funding to her outlet came with “no editorial restrictions,” and one Ukrainian outlet that has been heavily funded by the agency has aggressively investigated domestic corruption, apparently pissing off the country’s security services to such an extent that they allegedly spied on its journalists.) And no source of media funding is completely clean; every journalist’s job is to manage the conflicts that come with it. Ultimately, much of the work that USAID and other donors have supported would simply cease without it, in countries where commercial revenue streams for journalism are restricted by war, authoritarianism, or simple market forces.
Perhaps Trump, Musk, and their ilk, with their broadsides against mainstream media, don’t care about this sort of thing. But even from the vantage of self-interest, gutting funding for journalism overseas doesn’t seem especially smart in light of the new administration’s geopolitical goals (to the extent that these are possible to divine amid all the chaos and constantly shifting positions): one Iranian human rights expert noted to the New York Times that cutting off support to outlets that seek to hold the country’s rulers accountable doesn’t seem compatible with Trump’s “maximum pressure” approach to the regime; as I’ve reported, US government funding has also been steered to independent media in parts of the world where China is seeking to make inroads, a key stated concern of the new administration’s. As I’ve also reported, China and Russia have not been shy about exporting propaganda across the world and seeking to co-opt journalists on the ground into bolstering it. We shouldn’t want a US equivalent, of course—but truly independent journalism can shine a light through this sort of behavior, and through the workings of autocrats more broadly, in ways that are good for the truth and also for US strategic goals.
Ultimately, the future of USAID and its media funding is up in the air right now—like just about everything else. It’s possible, given this administration’s emerging track record of taking radical steps then backing off, that the freeze might be unfrozen; even if USAID is brought more closely under the purview of the State Department, Rubio is, or at least was, the sort of Republican who might see independent-media funding as strategically worthwhile. (In his comments yesterday, Rubio said that “a lot of functions” of USAID will continue as long as they’re aligned with “the national interest” rather than “charity.”) But other figures in the new administration might help steer a radically different course. On Sunday, we learned that Darren Beattie, a leading “MAGA intellectual” and founder of a right-wing media company, will fill a top role at State in an acting capacity. (Any permanent appointment would have to be confirmed by the Senate.) As CNN has reported, Beattie was a speechwriter in the first Trump administration but was fired after speaking at a conference attended by various prominent white nationalists. He has since made a parade of extreme comments including the assertion that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work.”
Beattie has also attacked both the media and USAID; in his column overnight, Grim described Beattie’s appointment as a “significant signal” and the equivalent of “a Democratic president sending Noam Chomsky to run the CIA.” Grim also wrote that, from his perspective, many of Beattie’s criticisms of USAID have been “on point,” even if he finds such agreement to be “disorienting” in light of Beattie’s overall worldview. Grim wrote something similar of Musk, arguing that he appears, in his attacks on USAID, to be advancing an argument against US state intervention abroad but could just as well be trying to privatize the tools of intervention for his own ends. For now, “Musk sending minions with fake lanyards…to try to get into classified rooms inside USAID indicates he’s a man bent more on conquest than liberation,” Grim concluded. Zooming out to address the convulsions of this moment, he quoted the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born.” Often forgotten, Grim wrote, is what Gramsci said next: “Now is the time of monsters.”
Other notable stories:
- In other news about the new administration and the media, CNN’s Brian Stelter examined the Federal Communications Commission’s recent demand that CBS News hand over materials related to a campaign interview with Kamala Harris that enraged Trump, and CBS’s decision to comply; the network said it had no choice, but legal experts dispute this, with one suggesting that its parent company “rolled over” to gain favorable treatment as it seeks federal approval of a merger. Elsewhere, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman who now chairs a DOGE committee, demanded that the leaders of NPR and PBS testify at a hearing on supposed media bias. And Rupert Murdoch, whose Wall Street Journal has been critical of Trump’s (so far abortive) trade wars, sat in as Trump took press questions in the Oval Office.
- Last week, the LA Times published an op-ed by Eric Reinhart, a social psychiatrist and political anthropologist; an initial draft and proposed headline were sharply critical of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick for health and human services secretary, but the piece eventually appeared in a form that, Reinhart said, neutered that criticism, in his view deliberately. The Times denied any breach of its editorial processes, but the piece was published in such a form that Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s owner, felt able to post it online in support of Kennedy’s confirmation—part of a broader litany of pro-Kennedy posts, NPR notes. Meanwhile, the Times is offering voluntary buyouts to staffers with two years of service; Semafor’s Max Tani has more.
- Nieman Lab’s Sophie Culpepper checked in with El Tímpano, an outlet that covers Latino and Mayan immigrant communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, about new policies that it has adopted to tell important human stories while protecting sources at risk of deportation. (“We were trying to think, how do we balance these two things?” an editor said.) Among other steps, El Tímpano will ensure potential sources are fully educated about the risks of talking to a reporter, place strict limits on the gathering and sharing of identifying details, focus on reaching members of the community in person or by SMS, and reinforce its own and sources’ privacy practices.
- Before Christmas, CJR’s Lauren Watson profiled Mongabay, an international nonprofit outlet that covers conservation news, and spoke with Gerry Flynn, a British journalist who had nearly been arrested while reporting on deforestation in Cambodia. Now Mongabay reports that Flynn was recently denied entry to that country, where he has lived since 2019, following a trip to Thailand; officials accused him of visa fraud—alleging that he worked as a journalist on an electrician’s visa—even though his paperwork appeared valid and he didn’t misrepresent himself.
- And for CJR, Nate Gowdy, an independent photojournalist who covered the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, reflects on Trump’s recent move to free convicted rioters. “The president’s blanket pardons for January 6 didn’t just free the charged and convicted. They effectively rewrote the past in real time, a direct assault on the historical record,” Gowdy writes. “I know what I saw. My photographs document a moment when democracy teetered, the nation’s timeline itself an active crime scene.”
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