Kari Lake Isn’t Telling the Truth About the VOA

This isn’t about the fate of VOA, whose broadcasts came to a halt shortly after Mr. Trump signed a March 14 executive order aimed at dismantling USAGM. Nor is it about the suffering of the journalists summarily dismissed, or the global harm to countries that will lose their only reliable source of information. This is about a lease and a building. Yet it’s also about our country’s trust that there is some purpose to the devastation under way at many federal agencies. Those doing the cutting use strong words like “propaganda,” “criminals” and “fraud” and describe outrages like millions of dead people receiving Social Security checks and billions of aid dollars being wasted—charges too sweeping and vague to assess quickly.

But the story of this lease is easy to check. I am the previous head of USAGM, and the lease was negotiated and signed six months ago under my watch. Ms. Lake’s tweet is so provably wrong that I would like to tell you the story.

USAGM has been housed since 1954 in the giant Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building, which opened in 1940. The General Services Administration, which owns and manages many federal buildings on behalf of taxpayers, gave USAGM an eviction notice in December 2020, forcing us to leave the building by 2028. At that point, the main elevator bank was out of service. The escalators broke more often than they functioned. Two of the three cables bringing electricity into the building no longer worked. The entire staff had to be evacuated when the last remaining cable began to smoke during our last few months in the building. Every time I walked to my office from my car I passed a jury-rigged contraption funneling water that leaked through the ceiling onto a tarp and then into plastic garbage cans. Mold forced many managers to abandon their offices.

Even before the eviction notice, we had spent years looking for a new building but couldn’t find one we could afford. Then came the Covid-19 pandemic.

Downtown Washington became a ghost town. Office buildings stood vacant. There were few prospective tenants. With some landlords staring down bankruptcy, our former chief financial officer spotted an opportunity, and our people negotiated a remarkable offer on the building featured in Ms. Lake’s video:

• A 15-year lease with no money down and free rent for the first three years.

• Furniture given to us at no cost by the previous tenant, a major law firm (the source of the “leather furnishings” and “Italian marble”). That alone, we estimated, would save us at least $10 million.

• An additional $27 million in cash incentives, paid by the building owner, which we planned to use to prepare for a modern broadcasting and digital-media future. Much of our technology was decades old, falling apart and not worth moving. The companies that built and supported the old equipment were rapidly dying, as were the technicians on whom we depended for repairs. The cash incentives were our only hope of rapidly upgrading without having to ask Congress for money—which it would almost certainly refuse.

• Those dozens of conference rooms? All built modularly, enabling us to turn them quickly and cheaply into the small, nimble broadcast studios that today’s digital broadcasting requires.

• As for the rent, the mammoth Cohen building was highly inefficient; about 40% of the space we had to pay for was unusable. Occupying a modern, space-efficient building dropped our rent from nearly $24 million to less than $16 million a year.

In other words, Ms. Lake has the truth exactly backward—and she must know it. (I left her a memo on the subject shortly before Mr. Trump’s inauguration.) The taxpayer didn’t pay for the nice furniture—it was provided by a desperate landlord. The government didn’t lose money, it saved—a lot. We estimated that savings over the 15-year lease—including the free rent and millions in cash incentives—would total more than $150 million.

The story of the VOA building isn’t especially important compared with the planned gutting of its entire parent agency. But the untruths presented here should reinforce Americans’ skepticism about other assertions of corruption, overspending and misdeeds by people who have given their lives to government work.

Don’t take my word for it. The lease is a public document. Submit a Freedom of Information Act request for it. Address it to Ms. Kari Lake.

Ms. Bennett served as director of the Voice of America (2016-20) and CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (2022-25).