The president signed two new executive orders, one that repeals several Biden-era labor and environmental policies and another that severely cuts various independent agencies.
President Donald Trump has signed an executive order seeking to eliminate several additional federal agencies, including one that oversees the federally funded media outlet Voice of America (VOA), testing the limits of his authoritative power as he seeks to shrink the size and scope of the federal bureaucracy.
One order signed Friday night calls for the agencies — some of which are focused on minority business enterprises, museum and library services, and homelessness prevention — to “be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”
It also instructs the heads of agencies to “reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law” and submit a report to the Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought confirming full compliance within seven days.
A second executive order revoked 19 executive actions signed by President Joe Biden that promoted clean energy and environmental goals. The order terminates proclamations of national monuments created by Biden and ends the use of the Defense Production Act to expand the U.S. manufacturing of clean energy technology (including mandates for electric heat pumps and solar panels), among other Biden-era policies.
The White House claimed the rules stem from “radical ideology” and were wasteful. One of the regulations that Trump canceled mandated a $15-an-hour minimum wage for federal contractors.
Since his return to office, Trump has signed a dizzying array of executive actions to enact his agenda and reduce the size of government, many of which have been challenged by opponents in court or reversed. Others, like this one, test the boundaries of presidential power.
The U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) — the parent of VOA, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia — is a congressionally chartered and independent agency, and Congress passed a law in 2020 intended to limit the power of the agency’s presidentially appointed chief executive.
The targeting of USAGM is not new, but concern around the media organization’s fate was renewed this year when Trump appointed Kari Lake, a loyalist who ran unsuccessfully for governor and Senate in Arizona, to serve as a special adviser at the agency.
Trump and other Republicans have long criticized VOA, whose mission is to counter authoritarian propaganda with independent news. During his first administration, Trump chastised VOA’s coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, derisively called the outlet the “voice of the Soviet Union” and accused the independent news service of promoting Chinese government propaganda in its reporting about the outbreak. He also declined to renew visas of dozens of foreign journalists who work for the agency.
In early February, tech billionaire Elon Musk, who spearheads the U.S. DOGE Service tasked with reducing the size of government, had also called for the closure of VOA and other outlets at USAGM.
The order also targets other lesser-known but broadly impactful agencies such as the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a nonpartisan global policy think tank; the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which supports and funds libraries, archives and museums in every state; Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, which focuses on labor disputes; the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, which centers on economically distressed communities; and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.
In a statement, the nonprofit EveryLibrary Institute decried the order and outlined that IMLS is statutorily required to send federal funding to state libraries. “Congress created this federal block grant program to support and extend library services in all the states through the state libraries,” EveryLibrary Institute said.