President Donald Trump on Friday signed an executive order seeking to eliminate agencies that serve the homeless, fund libraries and museums, and report the news.
The order is the latest move in Trump and Elon Musk’s attempt to drastically reshape the federal government by eliminating agencies and programs whose work they disagree with.
The order tells the seven agencies to reduce their operations to the bare minimum required by law. It explains this action as a continuation of “the reduction in the elements of the Federal bureaucracy that the President has determined are unnecessary.”
One of the agencies targeted is the Agency for Global Media (AGM), the parent of Voice of America (VOA), a publicly funded international broadcaster founded in 1942.
As of Saturday morning, many staff at VOA, whose editorial decisions Trump has criticized since his first term, had already been placed on leave, The New York Times reported.
The AGM, established by Congress, also oversees other well-known outlets, like Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia. Its weekly global audience is estimated at around 430 million.
Among the other agencies Trump gutted were the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which funds American libraries and museums, and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which works to address the homelessness crisis.
By dismantling agencies enshrined in law, the order seems to be Trump’s latest effort to test the limits of the executive branch’s power. Many of his previous actions—including an attempt to end birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution—have faced pushback from the courts.
This week, two federal judges ordered Trump’s administration to hire back tens of thousands of fired government workers.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the decision “absurd and unconstitutional,” while Musk has urged the impeachment of judges who go against Trump.
“Without judicial reform, which means at least the absolute worst judges get impeached, we don’t have real democracy in America,” the unelected tech billionaire wrote on X.
