House lawmakers expressed frustration Wednesday that U.S. government efforts to counter Russian disinformation and malign influence campaigns around the world are lagging, despite the controversies that bedeviled the 2016 U.S. elections and campaigns across Western Europe.

“I see little evidence that we are successful in using all of our tools and public diplomacy to get our message out and win the hearts and minds,” said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Nita Lowey, New York Democrat, said at a hearing of the panel’s Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs.

Testifying before the panel in addition to private experts were representatives of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which supervises such services as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.

The subcommittee questioned not only the effectiveness of USAGM and GEC but whether they were coordinating their efforts, the metrics they used to measure success and Russia’s influence on countries that were suffering from “democratic backsliding.”

John Lansing, CEO and director of USAGM, said his agency was reaching its target audience to make its case. One of agency’s latest digital video broadcasts had over 512 million views and the listeners were “young, savvy, future leaders.”

“Generally across the globe, all of our content on average has a trustworthy factor of 75 percent,” Mr. Lansing said. “And so the one thing we’re exporting beyond a particular message, or journalistic platform, is the fact that it’s believable.”

U.S. officials say they see no signs the Kremlin is backing off from its disinformation efforts, given how successful its influence operations have proved to date.

Jim Kulikowski, coordinator for the government’s Support for East European Democracy (SEED) program, said Russia’s “pattern is to create chaos, to seize any opportunity to go in to confuse and divert and undermine our processes that are underway.”

Mr. Lansing stated Russia is “sparing no expense” and that the efforts to combat disinformation were only becoming more expensive.

“The Russians will use every division possible to fragment us as a country,” added Lea Gabrielle, special envoy and coordinator for GEC. “They will use your words, they will use my words, they will use the president’s words, they will use any words they can to divide us and to separate us.”

Mr. Lansing cited, for example, the case of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, which was shot down over eastern Ukraine in 2014, an attack blamed on Russian-backed Ukrainian separatist forces. The narrative pushed by Russian sources was that the U.S. had “loaded the plane with dead bodies and shot it down themselves to blame the Russians,” he said.

Alina Polyakova is director of Project on Global Democracy and Emerging Technology at the Brookings Institution. She grew up in the Soviet Union in the 1980s listening to RFE/RL as a source of information about her own country, and said U.S. government broadcasting operations suffered from a lack of funding.

RFE/RL “is operating in a shoestring budget as far as I can tell. It is not competing in production values” with rival Russian sources, she told the House hearing.

Nina Jankowicz, global fellow at the Kennan Institute at the Wilson Center, described RFE/RL as “invaluable” even while they face issues of funding and breaking through crowded information environments.

“It’s not easy but we need to understand that journalism is a public good and continue investing in that. I think that’s critical,” Ms. Jankowicz said.

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