On March 14, U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to reduce funding for the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) and six other federal departments, scaling back their operations to the legal minimum. As a result, USAGM-affiliated media outlets, including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, will see substantial funding cuts or even elimination.
The USAGM oversees U.S. Government-funded foreign media outlets. According to its latest report to Congress, the agency employed around 3,500 media professionals and operated with a budget of $886 million in 2024. Officially, USAGM-affiliated media outlets are tasked with promoting America’s narrative and strengthening U.S. soft power. In practice, however, much like the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)—whose foreign aid contracts have already been drastically reduced by over 90 percent under the Trump 2.0 administration—USAGM functions as a key tool for spreading U.S. ideology, advocating American-style democracy. A prime example of this is that many Voice of America programs are inaccessible within the U.S. and are broadcast exclusively to select foreign audiences.
As expected, Trump’s decision to cut funding once again drew fierce criticism from his political opponents in the Democratic Party and nearly all U.S. mainstream media, with the exception of Fox News. The Trump administration defended the funding cuts, arguing that these agencies had failed in their mission and were plagued by corruption. However, critics contend that, beyond its unrivaled economic, technological and military dominance, the core of global U.S. hegemony lies in its ideological leadership.
To many, the world is divided into ideological camps, with the U.S. positioning itself as a beacon of democracy and freedom, guiding struggling nations towards progress.
Under this ideological framework, interventions in other countries’ internal affairs are often presented with a veneer of righteousness. Confident in its global dominance, the U.S. has continued to orchestrate political upheavals abroad, toppling foreign governments while neglecting its own domestic challenges.
Deteriorating infrastructure, a distorted industrial structure and escalating wealth inequality are among the pressing social issues that have yet to receive genuine attention. As of May 2023, U.S. manufacturing employment had declined by approximately 5 million jobs since 2000. During nearly the same period, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans controlled around 32 percent of the nation’s wealth, while the poorest 50 percent held a mere 2.5 percent. These structural imbalances have fueled populism in the Rust Belt, which ultimately helped Trump reclaim pivotal swing states like Pennsylvania and Michigan in the 2024 election.
The continued pursuit of regime-change interventions has not improved America’s soft power. From Iraq to Libya, from the Arab Spring to the Ukraine crisis, it has become increasingly clear that what the U.S. promotes is not prosperity and stability, but rather constant instability.
Ironically, America’s fixation on these interventions has ultimately poisoned its own political environment. When fervent supporters of a defeated Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol in 2021, they were following the same tactics the U.S. has employed to destabilize foreign governments—supporting opposition forces, manipulating media narratives and inciting street movements. That same year, a survey conducted by U.S. think tank Pew Research Center of 16 advanced economies, including 1,600 international respondents and 2,500 Americans, found that 57 percent of global respondents and 72 percent of Americans no longer considered the U.S. a model democracy worthy of emulation.
From this perspective, the corruption and inefficiency of USAID and USAGM are indicative of the structural crisis facing American-style democracy. For both the U.S. and the world at large, the U.S.’ diminishing obsession with serving as the so-called beacon of democracy may not be something to lament. The true essence of democracy has never been about replicating a perfect model, but about each civilization’s independent exploration to discover a development path suited to its own national conditions. The dimming of the beacon may not herald an endless night, but rather the dawn of a new day. –The Daily Mail-Beijing Review news exchange item
