Salmon’s Shrink Our Spending bills continues

Last week, Arizona Congressman Matt Salmon (AZ-05) introduced his fifth Shrink Our Spending (SOS) bill. His series of bills, to be introduced over the next few months, are intended to cut wasteful and duplicative spending.

“For my fifth SOS bill, I introduced legislation to eliminate federal funding for VOA. While originally commissioned to provide a ‘clear and effective presentation of the policies of the United States’, the VOA has veered from its original mission and has, sadly, become another duplicative, federal program,” said Salmon in a statement released upon the bill’s introduction. “Rather than working to fulfill its original mission, VOA has fallen into the rut of merely mimicking other news outlets by simply reporting news. Unbiased news reporting is important in countries where freedom of the press is limited. Because of this, the United States already funds organizations tasked with disseminating unfiltered news to regions of the world that lack a free press. While a worthy cause, it is not one VOA was primarily tasked to do.”

Salmon called VOA a “Cold War relic” and said that it had “rendered obsolete with the rise of the Internet and social media, especially in closed countries which have connected our world in ways we could have never imagined.” Salmon argued that with the “success of social media and other U.S. taxpayer-funded broadcasting programs, it makes fiscal sense to eliminate this superfluous federally funded entity.”

According to Salmon, the Voice of America (VOA) broadcasts began in 1942 as a response to the need for people in closed and war-torn societies to obtain reliable news. After World War II, VOA was preserved and transferred from the Department of War to the Department of State. According to its Charter, signed into law by President Gerald Ford in 1976, VOA is to “serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news, … present a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions, present the policies of the United States clearly and effectively, [as well as offer] discussions and opinion on these policies.”

VOA is now is one of a group of federally funded broadcasting entitles that reports to the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). In addition to overseeing the VOA, the BBG is responsible for supervising, directing, and overseeing the operations of the International Broadcasting Bureau (IBB) the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB, operating the Radio and TV Martí services to Cuba), and funds and provides oversight to the grantee broadcasters Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia (RFA), and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN).

The VOA received $196,375,000 in FY13.