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extensive investigations of the USAGM, each conducted during a 10-year period between 2010 and 2020.*! Security personnel and former agency senior leadership ignored these issues and allowed them to persist.*

In brief, the USAGM is vulnerable to exploitation by foreign spies. During the last six months of the Trump Administration, known foreign intelligence operatives were removed from the OCB and RFE/RL. During the 10-year period between 2010 and 2020, both the OPM and the ODNI found that the USAGM’s Office of Security (under the Office of Management) had grossly ignored and flouted many of the federal government’s most critical and long-standing information and personnel security protocols, regulations, and practices.

During the investigative period—in which the findings were largely, if not wholly, ignored by agency senior leadership—over 1,500 USAGM personnel (nearly 40 percent of its total workforce) were performing their Tier 3 and Tier 5 national-security-sensitive positions with falsified and/or unauthorized suitability-for-employment determinations and with access to sensitive federal buildings and information systems. In many cases, records (including Social Security numbers), were falsified or replaced with notional placeholders, and fingerprints (in many dozens of cases) were never submitted to the Federal Bureau of Investigation for basic background investigations.

By the time these issues were addressed by members of the Trump Administration, more than 500 personnel with unauthorized access and clearances had left the USAGM and rolled into other federal agencies with reciprocal clearance authorizations. Many others disappeared into U.S. society. As of January 2021, the USAGM had not yet determined the whereabouts of these individuals.**

The USAGM must never again be entrusted with delegated authority over its personnel security programs and suitability determinations until such time as it can prove that these failures will not happen again. These responsibilities must remain with the Department of Defense and the Office of Personnel Management, to which they were transferred in the final weeks of the Trump Administration.

Journalists’ Security. Agency journalists, both on and off American soil, have faced danger,® yet their superiors have done little to protect them. Whistleblowers and Trump Administration officials found that protection of USAGM American and foreign journalists employed by USAGM networks and grantee organizations was severely lacking.

Against often-significant resistance, political appointees forced action to enable broadcasters (who were under verified threats) to broadcast from remote locations while being protected by federal law enforcement officers. Likewise, political appointees met resistance from senior career officials when insisting that foreign-based journalists in high-risk countries make their locations known to the agency in the event they required rescue, extraction, or safe housing. Such safety measures, argued career officials, would somehow represent a violation of