Under Michael Pack, the U.S. Agency for Global Media has lost its way.
Under Michael Pack, the U.S. Agency for Global Media has lost its way.
F or decades, U.S.-funded global media outlets have been a source of critical information for those living under repressive dictatorships — so much so that when demonstrators marched on Belarus’s state media headquarters in August, they chanted “Radio Svoboda,” the name of a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty branch that serves the country.
These organizations, though funded by the U.S. government, have historically been editorially independent of government officials, and it’s this perception of autonomy that gave them the credibility that allows them to hold sway with foreign audiences. But under Michael Pack, the filmmaker and Steve Bannon ally who took the reins of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) in May, members of Congress on both sides of the aisle worry that the agency, which oversees these outlets, has lost its way.
Pack, who quickly fired the heads of these outlets, refused to renew the visas of foreign journalists working for them, and ousted top USAGM executives, has drawn criticism for politicizing the agency. He counters that he’s bringing much-needed oversight and reform to an ineffectual bureaucracy that has failed to promote America’s message and implement basic security and vetting procedures for new hires.
This came to a head last Thursday, when he skipped a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee despite previously committing to testifying. Criticism of Trump administration officials from Democrats, such as chairman Eliot Engel, is commonplace these days, but Republicans last week also did not hold back, expressing their concern with USAGM’s future under Pack.
Engel’s Republican counterpart, Michael McCaul, worries that the “agency is being undermined from the top,” and like other conservatives on Capitol Hill also believes that Pack’s conduct, as he said Thursday, “directly undermines key priorities of this administration.” McCaul’s concerns echo a bipartisan July 1 letter signed by Senators Collins, Graham, Moran, and Rubio; in it they questioned Pack’s firing of the heads of four of the organizations overseen by USAGM. The United States, they wrote, “cannot afford to invest in an enterprise that denigrates its own journalists and staff to the satisfaction of dictators and despots.”
It’s no wonder that Republicans are exasperated with Pack’s management of the agency. In addition to making ill-advised personnel changes, he has harmed the Trump administration’s Internet freedom agenda at a critical moment. Even as the president has cracked down on technology companies vulnerable to Chinese Communist Party influence, and as his administration has lent its support to pro-democracy demonstrators around the world, Pack has effectively defunded the Open Technology Fund (OTF), an agency that provides support to innovative projects that help circumvent authoritarian control of the Internet.
Since its founding in 2011 as an initiative within Radio Free Asia, OTF has launched a number of products that have helped dissidents, journalists, and human-rights activists working under authoritarian governments to circumvent strict Internet controls and bring information to the outside world. When people use WhatsApp, they are using an encryption algorithm that was developed with the help of OTF grants. The agency also has helped expose the Chinese Communist Party’s surveillance system in Xinjiang and provide journalists and demonstrators in Iran tools to get past a government Internet shutdown designed to quell protests last November. The fund became an independent grantee organization of USAGM last year. In 2020, OTF’s budget is just $20 million, but the impact of its work far exceeds that meager amount.
But Pack has effectively waged war against the agency. In June, he moved to fire OTF’s director and its advisory board (but was blocked by a federal court ruling). Starting in July, he held up USAGM’s monthly payments to the Open Technology Fund. During a call with congressional foreign-affairs staffers in August, USAGM claimed that Pack had approved a $1.6 million transfer to OTF, as is required for the month of July by the spending plan it submitted to Congress, according to a source familiar with the conversation. That funding materialized only after the call, and USAGM has made no subsequent payments required by the plan.
Instead, Pack has redirected the money to an office directly within his agency’s management structure called the Office of Internet Freedom. “Unlike prior USAGM leadership, which sidelined OIF, I consider bolstering Internet firewall circumvention to be a top priority,” Pack said in an August 18 statement.
That sounds like a commendable thing to do, but the decision has forced OTF to pause many of its projects, freezing its response to the crises in Hong Kong and Belarus when journalists and pro-democracy activists need them the most. During Thursday’s hearing, Karen Kornbluh, chairwoman of the OTF board, testified that defunding the agency has forced it to shelve 49 of its 60 programs: “In just four months, the world’s leading funder of Internet freedom technologies, OTF, has been dismantled.”
Good riddance, say those who support Pack’s dismantling of OTF. They view it as a crucial government-reform measure to cut waste, fraud, and abuse. At Newsweek, the American Foreign Policy Council’s James Robbins has recounted some of the agency’s recent shortcomings and wrote that it “duplicates the work of the State Department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor.”
The other main criticism of OTF is that its budget is wasteful. The only committee member to speak up in support of Pack last Thursday, Representative Scott Perry, alleged that only 25 percent of OTF’s budget goes toward developing technology: “The other 75 percent is dedicated to extravagant conferences at popular resort spots, extremely generous salaries, benefits, and redundant projects already being undertaken at other agencies.”
But neither of these claims — that OTF is redundant and that it is wasteful — holds much water. According to an OTF spend plan obtained by National Review, Perry’s numbers are incorrect. For Fiscal Year 2020, the agency was slated to spend a total of 66 percent of its budget on two funds devoted to developing and scaling up Internet technologies. Meanwhile, 1 percent of the budget, or $200,000, was earmarked for the “OTF Summit,” with another 1.5 percent dedicated to programmatic support for the event.
OTF also does not simply replicate the State Department’s work. While the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor does fund technology projects, it does so on a larger scale, and the process takes at least 18 months. By contrast, the OTF funds small, entrepreneurial projects with grants that take only 90 days to roll out. But it’s those tiny projects that have had an outsized impact, putting crucial technologies in the hands of people trying to fight digital authoritarianism.
Still, in one sense, OTF projects are redundant — but only because of Pack’s work. A Republican aide tells NR that there’s no way for the Office of Internet Freedom to pick up exactly where OTF was in its projects before Pack took over. “How are they making sure that Psiphon [a firewall circumvention tool] is going to be able to pick up exactly where their OTF money left off?” he said. “Surely there’s going to be some duplication of effort there.”
This isn’t to deny that USAGM and the Open Technology Fund had its shortcomings before Pack’s appointment, but this root-and-branch dismantling of OTF has been welcome news to the very authoritarian regimes that the Trump administration has otherwise taken to task. And it’s made American government more wasteful, not less.