This piece originally appeared in City Journal.
Last month, Kari Lake, senior adviser for the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), called the agency she oversees “irretrievably broken” and announced that she was gutting it. Lake accused USAGM, responsible for American broadcasting efforts in support of freedom and democracy abroad, of overspending and self-dealing, and alleged that spies and terrorist sympathizers had infiltrated it.
Just 12 days later, though, the Trump administration shrewdly saved the most important piece of the agency: the Open Technology Fund (OTF). In doing so, the administration reaffirmed that empowering people with open, secure technology is just as critical to U.S. foreign policy as are the messages we broadcast. Now it’s incumbent upon Congress to follow President Trump’s lead and realign USAGM’s mandate and funding to support what works.
Unlike most parts of USAGM, OTF does not produce news content. Instead, it funds and develops tools that help people in repressive regimes access blocked information. These include virtual private networks (VPNs), encrypted messaging apps like Signal, and censorship-resistant technologies such as Tor. All OTF-supported projects are open source and freely available to anyone.
