When President Trump announced on Friday that the United States would move ahead with a long-debated project to build a stealthy next-generation fighter jet, the message to China was clear: The United States plans to spend tens of billions of dollars over the next decade, probably far longer, to contain Beijing’s ability to dominate the skies over the Pacific.
But here on earth, the reality has been very different.
As the Department of Government Efficiency roars through agencies across government, its targets have included some of the organizations that Beijing worried about most, or actively sought to subvert. And, as with much that Elon Musk’s DOGE has dismembered, there has been no published study of the costs and benefits of losing those capabilities — and no discussion of how the roles, arguably as important as a manned fighter, might be replaced.
On the list of capabilities on life support is Radio Free Asia, a 29-year-old nonprofit that estimates its news broadcasts reach 60 million people in Asia each week, from China to Myanmar, and across the Pacific islands where the United States has been struggling to counter China’s narratives about the world. It furloughed all but 75 of its Washington staff members on Friday, trying to stay on the air while court cases develop on Trump officials’ moves to defund U.S. government-supported media.
At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth eliminated the Office of Net Assessment, an internal think-tank. With an annual budget that accounted for a few seconds of Pentagon spending each year, the office tried to think ahead about the challenges the United States would face a decade or two in the future — such as the new capabilities of artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons and the hidden vulnerabilities of supply chains for military contractors.
It was a revered institution, what a Wall Street Journal editorial this past week called “The Office that Won the Cold War.” Mr. Hegseth said in a statement that it would be reconstituted in some unspecified way “in alignment with the Department’s strategic priorities,” though its value was that it challenged conventional thinking about those priorities.
Over at the Department of Homeland Security, a series of cyberdefenses have been stripped away, at a moment when China’s state-backed hackers have been more successful than at any time in recent memory.
Among those dissolved, at least for the time being, is the Cyber Safety Review Board, created on the model of the National Transportation Safety Board, which examines aircraft accidents and tries to extract lessons learned. The cybersecurity board was just beginning to take testimony on how Chinese intelligence bored deep inside America’s largest telecommunications firms, including the system the Justice Department uses to monitor its “lawful intercept” system, which places wiretaps on people suspected of committing crimes or spying — including Chinese spies.
Now the board has been disbanded. No one at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency seems able to say what has happened into the investigation into one of the most successful penetrations of American networks, or who is now responsible for figuring out why American telecommunications firms were caught unawares, for more than a year, by China’s Ministry of State Security.
The list goes on, more evidence that in its first two months the new administration has been devastatingly efficient in tearing things down, but painfully slow to explain how their actions fit into their broader strategy.
All this has the Chinese celebrating. As the Voice of America was being dismantled and fell silent, The Global Times, a mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party, wrote that “the so-called beacon of freedom, VOA, has now been discarded by its own government like a dirty rag.”
China is still trying to take its measure of the new administration, which is putting new sanctions on Chinese entities that buy Iranian oil, but is also talking about wiping out the CHIPS and Science Act. The law not only provided federal funding to jump-start the production of advanced semiconductors in the United States, but provided billions for advanced work in a range of key technologies, from batteries to quantum computing, that China is subsidizing.
“It’s a contradiction, as the Chinese say, that we are cutting back on our instruments of national power while saying that we are stepping up our competition with Beijing,” said Michael J. Green, chief executive of the United States Study Center at the University of Sydney in Australia. “When we reveal human rights abuses or Chinese misinformation, it’s another form of competition with China. And getting rid of it only creates a vacuum that Beijing is going to try to fill. And we are already seeing that happening.”
The speed of the dismantlement has left many Asia experts a bit stunned, because they know the new aircraft — which Mr. Trump said would be called the F-47, clearly in homage to his own second term — will not contribute to American deterrence for a decade, if it is on time.
“The charge for the United States is to deter war with China without capitulation and to compete effectively across all the areas of soft power,” Richard Fontaine, the chief executive of the Center for a New American Security and a former Republican aide to John McCain in the Senate, said on Friday. “The United States has an array of tools to do this, including humanitarian aid, development assistance, support for democracy abroad, and strategic communications efforts. Strangely, these are the efforts most under threat by the new cost-cutting teams.”
“If it goes too far,” he warned, “it will amount to unilateral disarmament in the world’s most important contest.”
It is hard to find an understandable theme to the cuts; some are based on perceived acts of disloyalty, or old grudges, or a sense that even state-financed media or think tanks are inhabited by anti-Trump liberals.
Sometimes it is especially mystifying. The Office of Net Assessment, for example, was mostly staffed by career civilians or uniformed military, who are asked to think outside the box: How would a prolonged economic downturn in China affect its leaders’ thinking about Taiwan? What happens to warfighting when manned aircraft — like the newly announced jet fighter — can be regularly outmaneuvered by autonomous weapons?
The cuts at Radio Free Asia, which broke many of the biggest stories about the internment camps China has built to “re-educate” Uyghurs in Xinjiang, are among the most mystifying. Its broadcasts have been attacked by Beijing, which has gone to great lengths to censor the reports and broadcast their own narrative, often on YouTube and X.
Bay Fang, the president of Radio Free Asia, a nonprofit that gets its $60 million budget from a congressionally approved disbursement, said in an interview that she doubted the organization was specifically targeted.
DOGE and the White House were gunning for Voice of America, which has hundreds of millions of listeners and readers, and which Mr. Trump has denounced as “the Voice of Radical America.” In one of his executive orders, he said he would “ensure taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.” (Almost all of Voice of America’s staff of 1,300 journalists have been put on paid leave.)
“You have only to look at the way dictators in the region are celebrating our defunding,” Ms. Fang said in an interview. “We provide a voice that counters their propaganda and shines a light into dark corners they’d rather leave untouched.” The result, she said, is that “we are an essential way that America wins trust among the people living in these authoritarian countries. Shuttering RFA is not only their loss, but America’s.”
Winning trust, however, is hard to quantify. It takes years, and the results are not as easy to demonstrate as showing off a new fighter jet and, in the case of the new F-47, the semiautonomous attack drones that fly alongside.
Radio Free Asia’s budget is so small that Ms. Fang said she was pretty certain the nonprofit was “collateral damage” as the administration moved to defund the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which also supports Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
The defunding is taking place even before the Senate has confirmed Mr. Trump’s choice to head the global media agency, L. Brent Bozell III, a conservative political activist. He has picked Kari Lake, the pro-MAGA former journalist who lost a Senate race in Arizona, as the new head of Voice of America, but for now she is only a “special adviser” because Mr. Trump fired the board members that could have replaced the current leader.
This administration clearly regards “soft power” as a largely irrelevant concept. But the lack of it leaves a vacuum that Beijing will happily fill.
“It seem self-defeating that while China mounts unrelenting cyberattacks, builds a Navy to defeat the U.S. Pacific fleet, sends ‘wolf-warrior’ diplomats far afield, and created alternatives to the dollar that America pulls inward and closes off avenues of information to the Chinese people,” said Paul Kolbe, a career C.I.A. officer who spent much of his career countering Soviet propaganda and covert operations.
Speaking from Jakarta, Mr. Kolbe answered his own question: “We affirm Chinese beliefs that they are ascendant, and that our decline is accelerating.”