On Friday, Radio Free Asia (RFA) announced that its news operations would be suspended due to the government-funded news outlet’s dire financial situation, which was brought on by funding cuts under President Donald Trump’s administration and the ongoing US government shutdown.
According to Bay Fang, president and CEO of RFA, the outlet has been “forced to suspend all remaining news content production.”
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RFA is taking additional steps to responsibly shrink its already diminuted footprint, she said on Wednesday in an effort to conserve the scarce resources on hand and prevent the possibility of restarting operations if consistent funding is available.
Fang added that RFA would officially start closing its overseas offices and will begin terminating its furloughed staff. She claimed that since March, numerous staff members have taken unpaid leave of absence due to the US Agency for Global Media’s (USAGM) unlawful termination of RFA’s Congressionally Apportioned Grant.
Aside from USAGM, an independent US government agency established in the mid-1990s to provide information to areas with weak press freedom records, Trump signed an executive order effective on March 14th.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE) and Voice of America (VOA) are also featured on USAGM along with RFA.
RFA was forced to terminate most of its overseas contractors and put three-quarters of its US-based employees on unpaid leave following the executive order in March.
In May, a second round of widespread layoffs, as well as the termination of several RFA language services, including Tibetan, Burmese, and Uighur, were also announced.
In March, Trump signed another executive order authorizing the organization’s nearly 1,400 employees to take paid leave of absence, which he called the “total left-wing disaster” (total left-wing disaster) to go on. Since then, it has only been operating on a limited basis.
Trump has alleged that government agencies like RFA, RFE, and VOA are biased against his administration and that they are a waste of money.
RFA has provided English- and local-language online and broadcast services to residents of region’s most oppressive regimes since its founding in 1996.
Its main initiatives include the publication of events inside the hermit state, North Korea, and the world’s only independent Uyghur-language outlet covering the oppressed ethnic group in western China.
Make no mistake, authoritarian regimes are already ecstatic about the potential demise of RFA, according to an announcement penned by RFA executive editor Rosa Hwang, which was published on the outlet’s website on Wednesday.
RFA’s core values include independent reporting. That voice is in danger, according to Hwang for the first time since RFA’s founding almost 30 years ago.
“We still think strongly about the urgency of that task and the extraordinary journalists’ perseverance. We’ll return once our funding is secured, she continued.
RFE/Radio Liberty, which went through its own round of furloughs earlier this year, announced this week that its news services are currently in use and have received its final round of federal funding.
It stated that “we intend to continue providing our audiences with this service for a while.”





