The American broadcaster Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty is suing its parent company, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) after the outlet was cut off from federal grant money.
In a complaint filed in federal court this week, lawyers for Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty say the Trump administration and two senior officials — special advisor Kari Lake and USAGM Senior Advisor Victor Morales — violated the law by depriving the broadcaster of funds that were approved by Congress for its continued operations.
The grant money was terminated late last week after President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order directing USAGM and six other agencies to significantly pare down their activities and lay off employees.
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia are private institutions that are recognized by the federal government as tax-exempt organizations. By law, they are permitted to receive funding from the government as appropriated by Congress.
The organizations are supervised by USAGM, which operates a number of other external broadcast outlets, including Voice of America (VOA), Radio Marti and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty delivers news, information and entertainment in two dozen languages, targeted at nearly 30 countries, most of which are in Eastern Europe and were part of the former Soviet Union.
Officials at Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty said the paring down of federal grant money for their continued operations had the potential for dire consequences in the immediate future, as their programming tends to serve as a reliable counter to misleading propaganda broadcast by other countries.
“This is not the time to cede terrain to the propaganda and censorship of America’s adversaries,” Stephen Capus, the President of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, said in a statement late Tuesday evening. “We believe the law is on our side, and that the celebration of our demise by despots around the world is premature.”
Voice of America has been airing this 45-second video on a loop since Saturday, when many of its on-air and behind-the-scenes workers were suspended following an Executive Order signed by President Trump that effectively forced layoffs at the broadcaster. pic.twitter.com/4zVhOfV6oy
— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) March 19, 2025
Some countries that viewed Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty through an adversarial lens are already celebrating.
Officially, the Kremlin in Moscow has nothing to share when it comes to how it feels about the situation involving Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, with a spokesperson calling the outlet “purely propagandistic” and the matter involving funding cuts and staff layoffs one that “does not particularly concern us.”
But some former Kremlin officials said they welcomed the demise of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, with one telling the Moscow Times that the broadcaster was an “outdated, stupid tool” and saying he welcomed Trump’s actions to dismantle it.
When it comes to broadcasting, Russia has been aggrieved by the U.S. government before: Last year, the State Department under the Biden administration imposed sanctions on Russia’s external broadcast outlets RT and Sputnik News after finding them liable for helping Russian forces raise money to procure weapons for the country’s ongoing war in Ukraine. The sanctions forced Sputnik News to stop broadcasting its radio programming on two dozen AM and FM stations across the U.S.
Two years earlier, the Washington studio of RT America was shut down and the channel stopped broadcasting after the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) demanded RT’s stateside on-air talent, correspondents, producers and photojournalists register as “foreign agents.” The demand was issued by the DOJ in 2017, during Trump’s first term in office.
