Trump Celebrates After Killing Anti-Money-Laundering Law (2025)

Donald Trump’s recent spate of crackdowns and reshuffling at the Voice of America reveal the administration’s plan to transform the award-winning newsroom into a MAGA propaganda machine.

VOA’s chief national correspondent, Steve Herman, was placed under investigation last week, for allegedly expressing political bias against the Trump administration in his social media posts, according to The New York Times.

A memo sent to Herman listed a swath of reasons he’d come under scrutiny. One of the reasons cited is Trump’s executive order titled “One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations,” which includes the provision that “failure to faithfully implement the President’s policy is grounds for professional discipline, including separation.”

Herman said he has been placed under a paid “excused absence” and expects to lose his job, according to NPR.

This isn’t the first time Herman has been the subject of this kind of investigation: He was the subject of a probe about the same supposed issue during the last year of Trump’s first administration. That time, leadership at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, or USAGM, which oversees VOA, had claimed that Herman’s posts relaying criticism of Trump betrayed a political bias. A federal judge found that former USAGM CEO Michael Pack had violated journalists’ First Amendment rights by interfering with VOA.

By comparison, this probe is coming directly from VOA’s acting senior program director, John Featherly, with the approval of VOA’s director, Michael Abramowitz, a Biden-era figure. But again, the probe specifically cites Herman’s engagement with social media posts regarding the second Trump administration’s trove of controversies.

Crucially, Herman himself is not expressing any attitudes, only sharing perspectives critical of the Trump administration—not atypical for a journalist.

At the same time, VOA moved its White House bureau chief, Patsy Widakuswara, who has 27 years of experience, to another beat. Journalists at VOA told NPR that no rationale was given for the reshuffling.

That wasn’t the only shakeup at VOA last week.

Former TV anchor turned failed MAGA Senate candidate Kari Lake was made a special adviser at VOA, pending her confirmation to run the agency. Trump’s pick to head USAGM, Brent Bozell III, needs to be confirmed before Lake can formally take the reins from Abramowitz.

Lake has alleged liberal bias at VOA but promised that the agency “won’t become Trump TV.”

In an email announcing her appointment, USAGM’s chief, Roman Napoli, wrote that Lake’s experience “will be invaluable as we continue our mission to clearly and effectively present the policies of the Trump Administration around the world.”

As Brian Stelter, CNN’s chief media analyst, pointed out in a series of posts on X Monday, “That is NOT the assignment that Congress gave USAGM.” Rather, the mission statement of USAGM, which is codified into U.S. law, is to “inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”

Herman’s likely dismissal and Widakuswara’s reassignment are “having a chilling effect on the entire institution,” one VOA staffer said, according to Stelter.

U.S. Agency for International Development acting assistant administrator Nicholas Enrich—who was placed on administrative leave for writing two damning memos regarding the agency’s recent failure to provide lifesaving international aid in the midst of Marco Rubio’s program freeze—was about to publish a third. And it’s even worse than the rest, according to The Bulwark.

In his first memo, Enrich described severe staff reductions, from 783 positions to 69, and in his second, he noted that 72 different USAID activities had no funding, leading to a death toll that is “not known.” But in his third memo, Enrich estimates how many people will die or get deadly diseases as a result of the cuts.

The memo notes that a permanent halt of $7.7 billion in aid could lead to “12.5–17.9 million cases of malaria with an additional 71,000–166,000 deaths annually,” “a 28 to 32 percent increase in tuberculosis globally,” “an additional 200,000 paralytic polio cases a year,” and in a potential worst-case scenario, over “28,000 cases of Ebola, Marburg, or related diseases,” according to The Bulwark’s summary.

These programs are much more critical than the Trump administration would have the public believe, as it peddles false conspiracy theories about USAID like the agency providing condoms for Hamas.

Enrich went on to write that potentially 17 million pregnant women would lose access to lifesaving services, more than 11 million newborns would go without postnatal care, and about one million children would not receive treatment for severe acute malnutrition.

“Weakened disease surveillance doesn’t only jeopardize natural outbreak detection—it also creates openings for malicious actors,” he wrote. “Global health monitoring systems serve as the ‘smoke alarm’ for unusual disease patterns that could signal a bioterrorism event. If those alarms are switched off or muted due to lack of funding, a deliberate release of a pathogen could spread for weeks under the guise of a normal outbreak.”

Sources close to Enrich told The Bulwark that he knew publishing the memos would be career suicide. And while this memo is a crucial look into what is actually being lost in these cuts, it’s likely Trump will never lay eyes on it.

The Trump administration might exclude government spending from gross domestic product reports to cover up upcoming poor economic reports, and to hide the true scope of Department of Government Efficiency cuts.

In an interview on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures over the weekend, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was asked whether the massive cuts spurred by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative could have a negative impact on the economy.

Lutnick’s response was to cast doubt on GDP reports and announce a change.

“You know that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said. “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”

This would present an inaccurate picture of the U.S. economy and complicate what is considered a measuring tool for the country’s economic health. Government actions impact the economy in many ways, from deficits and regulations, to tax and spending changes. With DOGE actions resulting in many federal workers losing their jobs, and more layoffs on the horizon, these ex-employees will be reducing their spending, which will have ripple effects on the economy.

Lutnick appears to be repeating what Musk posted on X on Friday. The tech mogul/fascism enthusiast also attacked how the GDP is measured, claiming that “a more accurate measure of GDP would exclude government spending.”

“Otherwise, you can scale GDP artificially high by spending money on things that don’t make people’s lives better,” Musk’s post added.

Musk was corrected by his own Community Notes feature on X, which pointed out that the government already has a report measuring GDP excluding government spending called “Value Added by Private Industries” that accounts for 88.7 percent of American GDP.