President Donald Trump said Friday he won’t allow the Pentagon to cut funding for the military’s independent newspaper, Stars and Stripes, effectively halting Department of Defense leaders’ plans to shut down the paper this month.
Trump’s tweet came as he fought off new accusations that he called service members killed in World War I “losers” and “suckers” during an event in France in 2018. The comments, first reported by The Atlantic and confirmed by The Associated Press, are shining a fresh light on Trump’s previous public disparaging of American troops and military families, and they delivered a new campaign issue to his Democratic rival Joe Biden, less than two months from Election Day.
Earlier Friday, the Pentagon had ordered the immediate shutdown of Stars and Stripes, the bastion publication of the United States Armed Forces that has continuously covered military matters since the Civil War, according to reports.
The move, before it apparently was pulled back by the president, came after the newspaper was stripped of all its federal funding in the annual Defense Department budget in February.
Military brass had given the go-ahead to completely shutter the editorially independent organization by the end of the month and completely dissolve it by Jan. 31, 2021, according to reports.
The publisher received a memo this week requiring the operation to devise a plan that “dissolves the Stars and Stripes” by Sept. 15 and also present a “specific timeline for vacating government owned/leased space worldwide.”
The memo was reportedly sent by Col. Paul Haverstick Jr., a career Army public affairs officer who now serves as director of the defense media activity at Fort Meade, Maryland.
“The last newspaper publication (in all forms) will be September 30, 2020,” Haverstick reportedly wrote.
News of the impending shutdown was first revealed in an editorial written by USA Today contributor Kathy Kiely.
Troops worldwide depend on the newspaper and its website for coverage of issues specific to the U.S. military. It has more than 1.3 million daily readers.
In February, the Pentagon’s annual budget proposal stripped Stars and Stripes of all its federal funding for fiscal year 2021 — a loss of more than $15 million annually.
At the time, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the Pentagon planned to redirect the funds to other programs, such as space, nuclear and hypersonic systems, Military.com reported.
“We trimmed the support for Stars and Stripes because we need to invest that money, as we did with many, many other programs, into higher-priority issues,” he said during a news conference at NATO headquarters in Brussels.
While the newspaper is mostly funded by federal dollars, it also makes money through advertising, subscriptions and sales.
Congress has not yet approved the defense budget request for fiscal 2021.
A Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act also leaves out funding for the newspaper, but lawmakers will convene this fall to develop a joint version of the bill, according to reports.
But the memo sent to Stars and Stripes said the dissolution of the newspaper would proceed even if Congress issued a “continuing resolution” to maintain its funding at the same levels from the previous fiscal year.
During a markup of the annual defense budget in July, the House Armed Services Committee addressed the defunding, with Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, amending the budget to reallocate money to the paper to keep it running.
“Thousands of troops around the globe rely on them for the kind of news that just isn’t covered elsewhere -- stories from American bases, the latest Department of Defense news, and transparency coverage that cuts through political and military brass BS talking points,” Gallego said at the time. “It’s exactly the type of honest coverage that our armed forces need, and we weren’t going to let the administration stifle these voices without a fight.”
Earlier this week, a bipartisan group of 15 senators led by California Democrat Dianne Feinstein sent a letter to Esper urging him to restore full funding to the “historically significant publication,” saying the news organization’s annual operating cost was only “a tiny fraction” of the overall Defense budget of $740 billion.
“Stars and Stripes is an essential part of our nation’s freedom of the press that serves the very population charged with defending that freedom,” the senators, including four Republicans, wrote Wednesday, according to Military.com. “Therefore, we respectfully request that you rescind your decision to discontinue support for Stars and Stripes and that you reinstate the funding necessary for it to continue operations.”
In a separate letter to Esper, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham called the move to defund Stars and Stripes “premature.”
“As a veteran who has served overseas, I know the value Stars and Stripes brings to its readers.” he wrote.
Lawmakers stressed the critical role of an operation that delivers news stories which would otherwise go unreported.
“Most recently, the paper brought to light the failure of schools on U.S. military installations to shut down during the pandemic, despite Japanese public schools doing so. These stories illustrate why Stars and Stripes is essential: they report on stories that no one else covers,” the lawmakers wrote.
According to USA Today, Stars and Stripes was first published on Nov. 9, 1861, in Bloomfield, Missouri, after troops led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant commandeered the abandoned offices of a Confederate publisher.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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