I never expected there would be days and action like these where the federal government is involved in silencing itself.
I once ran a news division inside the United States Information Agency, VOA's old home before it was folded into the U.S. Agency for Global Media. I know exactly what that charter was designed to prevent, because I watched officials on both sides of the aisle argue over its language, word by word, precisely so that no future administration could turn our newsroom into a megaphone for itself. What's happening now to Voice of America and Stars and Stripes is the scenario that charter was written to stop.
Start with VOA. In March 2025, more than a thousand employees were put on leave, broadcasts went dark, and the agency's new leadership called it "irretrievably broken." That is not a management decision. It is a dismantling. Federal courts have since agreed: a judge found that the official running USAGM had been doing so illegally, and voided the layoffs she ordered. Another ruling forced the agency to restore broadcasting altogether, on the grounds that Congress, not any single administration, controls whether VOA's mandate continues. Congress backed that up with its own funding, over the administration's objections.
I have no political affiliation and do not say this as a partisan point. The charter has survived Democratic and Republican administrations alike for eighty years precisely because both parties understood the value of a newsroom the government funds but does not control. That it took a lawsuit and a court order to enforce that basic premise should alarm anyone who has worked inside that system, regardless of who they voted for.
Stars and Stripes tells a quieter but related story. It has no statutory charter protecting it, its independence has always rested on tradition and on the discretion of whoever runs the Pentagon. That tradition is now being tested directly. This year, the Defense Department signaled it wanted the paper "aligned" with the administration's priorities. Job applicants were reportedly asked how they'd advance the administration's policy goals. The paper's independent ombudsman, whose entire job was to safeguard editorial independence, was fired in the spring after she said publicly that recent moves were hurting the troops who depend on accurate coverage. And this month, the Pentagon placed an active-duty officer into the newspaper's senior leadership without so much as consulting its longtime publisher, who promptly announced his retirement, citing "fundamental" differences with the department's vision for the paper.
Three senators have now asked Secretary Hegseth to explain himself by the end of the month. I hope he gives them a real answer, because the question is the right one: how does a newsroom whose credibility depends on independence from the military chain of command stay credible once an active-duty officer sits in its leadership?
I don't think either story is really about VOA or Stars and Stripes narrowly. I think they're about whether the United States still believes in something it invented during World War II and formalized during the Cold War: that government money and editorial independence aren't contradictions, that a newsroom can serve the public without serving whoever happens to be in office. Authoritarian states don't have to argue with that idea. They just fund propaganda outright and skip the pretense. Part of what distinguished American public broadcasting, for all its imperfections, was that it never made that trade.
The courts have so far held the line on VOA. Stars and Stripes doesn't have that legal backstop, which is exactly why the coming weeks matter. Whoever the Pentagon installs to succeed Max Lederer will tell us a great deal about whether that paper's hundred-and-sixty-year tradition of independence survives this administration, or becomes one more casualty of an argument I thought Washington had settled long ago.
https://www.voanews.com/
https://www.stripes.com/opinion/2026-08-21/military-deputy-open-letter-stripes-22619698.html