Critics of President Biden’s nominee to lead the U.S. agency that oversees several independent U.S.-grantee media organizations, including Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, are urging senators ahead of a key hearing to scrutinize what they characterize as a pattern of political bias and mismanagement.
Amanda Bennett, a former VOA director and Biden’s pick to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media, will testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, during a confirmation hearing that could yield some contentious exchanges.
If confirmed, Bennett will oversee the U.S. government’s work to support media outlets on which millions of people around the world rely for information untouched by authoritarian censorship.
For years, USAGM has been a political lightning rod, attracting bipartisan criticism for a series of lapses identified by government investigators. The Office of Personnel Management and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have both found serious flaws in the agency’s vetting of its foreign-national employees.
During the Trump administration, the agency was also the scene of a number of high-profile political disputes, with Democrats objecting to the way in which Michael Pack, the Trump-appointed CEO, ran the agency. Bennett, just ahead of Pack’s arrival at USAGM in 2020, quit her VOA job, as she anticipated that she would be fired.
Soon after taking office, the Biden administration fired Pack’s team and restored members of the previous leadership of USAGM to their roles. Biden nominated Bennett for the CEO post in November.
All of this has set the stage for a quiet but intense campaign against Bennett’s nomination on Capitol Hill.
At least a dozen current and former VOA staffers have mobilized in recent months to lobby senators of both parties against Bennett’s confirmation, alleging that she wasted federal resources, empowered questionable administrators, and oversaw serious security lapses during her tenure as director.
The staffers involved in that specific effort, the majority of whom are concentrated in VOA’s Persian Service, have focused on Senators Bob Menendez and Jim Risch, the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the committee. Committee staffers for each of the lawmakers have taken meetings and calls with the Bennett opponents, a source affiliated with that effort said.
During those conversations, the VOA staff members alleged that Bennett gave choice positions only to her friends within the agency and wasted government funds on an unnecessary management software that cost $12 million.
A separate dossier circulating around Capitol Hill prompts senators to ask Bennett about those topics, as well as a number of other controversies that occurred during her tenure.
In May, before Bennett’s hearing was scheduled, a congressional aide told NR that “a number of offices on the Hill” are looking into information they have received about Bennett, as is standard for any nominee.
Another congressional staffer said that Bennett’s record should inspire some rigorous questioning during tomorrow’s hearing.
“Given concerns raised that Bennett is hyper-partisan, that she presided over significant security lapses while at the agency and squandered public funds on content management systems that never worked,” the staffer said, “we hope the Senate will ask probing questions and scrutinize her record.”