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Biden Administration reinstated OTF to full operational status and ceased all investigations immediately after assuming office.

ATTEMPTS AT REFORM

Late in the Trump Administration, following the long-delayed Senate confirmation of Michael Pack as USAGM Chief Executive Officer (CEO),” agency leadership rapidly initiated long-overdue and necessary reforms,'* including security reforms repeatedly requested by the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) that had been ignored by USAGM leadership.”? Unfortunately, as was the case with the OTF, the Biden Administration immediately reinstated personnel who had been fired for gross security violations, placing the agency back into its previously failed posture—one that poses a danger to national security.

The Firewall Saga. The vital error in USAGM’s current organizational/cultural calculus is the agency’s selective application of a journalistic “firewall.” The amorphous interpretation of a firewall shifts, depending on which Administration is in office and who is asking questions.

Although a firewall should ensure journalistic independence, it has been used without formal regulation for decades in order to shirk legitimate oversight of everything from promoting adversaries’ propaganda to ignoring journalistic safety. Often, the “firewall” is touted when journalists are either promoting anti-American propaganda that parrots adversarial regime talking points or promoting politically biased viewpoints in opposition to the VOA charter.”°

Such weak oversight, alien to any other large media network or news organization—particularly one derivative of U.S. foreign policy and national security goals—was erroneously enshrined in a document known as the Firewall Regulation.”’ The Firewall Regulation was entered into the Federal Register on the eve of the Senate confirmation of President Donald Trump’s USAGM CEO, Michael Pack. It was the quintessential “midnight reg” designed to throttle the statutory and executive authority of the agency head. It stipulated that agency management, by standards unknown to most large broadcast companies, was forbidden from engaging in oversight and direction of content in any way—even false content. It ran counter to the law, including the Smith-Mundt Act,” and it was harmful to the agency itself and to the foreign policy and national security goals of the US. government.

Even content that went well beyond fair and accurate reporting on U.S. domestic and political problems could not be reined in by front office leadership under the Firewall Regulation. Soon, VOA’s White House correspondent was posting content highly critical of, and personally insulting to, the U.S. President—in contradiction of VOA’s own journalistic standards, policies, and procedures. USAGM career officials considered such content sacrosanct and bravely independent “journalistic”