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Danila Galperovich loves everything about working at Trader Joe's. Well, he used to make much more money as an international broadcaster, but by every other metric, he loves it.
Galperovich adores the customers who come into the store in Arlington, Virginia. He regales them with his knowledge of French wine and learns their stories. He cherishes his co-workers - a former CNN sound engineer, a former police computer specialist, a guy on his third self-published book. And, he says, Trader Joe's health insurance beats anything the U.S. government provides.
When President Donald Trump took office for a second term last year, Galperovich wasn't stocking shelves, bagging groceries or dishing out advice on cabernet sauvignon. He was working as a reporter for the Russian service of Voice of America, the U.S. government-run broadcaster tasked with bringing free, fair and impartial journalism into countries where that's either hard to come by or a dangerous act of resistance.
Such is the case in his home country of Russia, which he fled in 2017 after VOA was labeled a "foreign agent" by the Kremlin. He was tipped off by an acquaintance in the Russian state media that his passport could be seized, and - taking the hint - he fled to Prague the very next day. In 2018, he and his wife, a florist, moved to the United States and made a home in Virginia.
But when Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 ordering VOA's parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), to be scaled back to "the minimum presence and function required by law," VOA - under Trump official Kari Lake - put full-time employees on administrative leave. Contractors like Galperovich were immediately cut without any severance, despite doing effectively the same job as the full-timers.
Galperovich, who has a heart condition that requires expensive medication, needed a job quickly.
Galperovich isn't alone in having scrambled for work. While hundreds of VOA journalists remain on paid administrative leave, where they've lingered since March 2025 while litigation against the government continues, hundreds more contractors - including Galperovich - had to reinvent their careers almost overnight, often leaving journalism behind entirely.
Voice of America was started in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda, broadcasting accurate news into occupied Europe to build credibility with its audience. It became a crucial diplomatic tool during the Cold War along with sister organization Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, often the only news sources to break through the Iron Curtain. In recent years, it has remained important as a news source for less-free countries, and as an important tool for helping other countries understand the United States.
'A sense of betrayal'
Ksenia Turkova knows the feeling of watching a newsroom vanish overnight better than most. A TV host and reporter in Moscow in the early 2000s, she worked at NTV - once Russia's premier independent news channel - until it was taken over by the state-controlled gas giant Gazprom. She helped start a channel, but it was shut down overnight. And another - same result. When VOA collapsed last year, old NTV colleagues she hadn't heard from in years reached out, telling her they couldn't believe something like this was happening to her yet again - and in the United States this time.
Turkova had never gone more than a day in her career without a new job lined up - in Russia, censorship had pushed her from newsroom to newsroom, but something always came along, sometimes the very same day. This time, nothing did. To cope, she took a job as a barista at Sweet Lemon, a small cafe on Capitol Hill founded by a Belarusian woman. Turkova, who had fallen for coffee culture while living in Ukraine, described her thinking: "As a coffee lover, maybe I should try that just … as a therapy."
She left the job that fall, worn down by the long commute from her home in Rockville - though she still fills in occasionally when the cafe is short-staffed. She now works as a Ukrainian medical interpreter at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, helping wounded Ukrainian soldiers navigate treatment through a nonprofit called United Help Ukraine. She also teaches Russian privately and takes on occasional freelance journalism projects.
"I did have a sense of betrayal," she said, first from Russia and then from the U.S. In January 2025, Russia labeled her a foreign agent. VOA's shutdown order came two months later.
'VOA is doomed for sure'
Margaret Besheer, VOA's longtime United Nations correspondent, didn't wait to be pushed out by the Trump administration. She had spent 17 years covering the U.N. - 30 years total as an international journalist in more than 20 countries, including during the Iraq War - and had covered Trump's first term without much interference. The second felt different from day one. On Inauguration Day 2025, as the new administration began freezing foreign aid, she had a thought: "If they're crippling USAID, the agency that feeds kids and saves lives, then VOA is doomed for sure," she remembers thinking. Two days later, she signed up for real estate license classes.
It wasn't a total leap. Besheer, a fourth-generation Brooklynite, had quietly considered real estate as a second act for six or seven months. She's now a real estate agent in New York and says the skills transfer almost one to one: interviewing clients to learn what they want, researching properties, communicating clearly under deadline and pressure.
Besheer was a full-time federal employee, so she got an early-retirement buyout. She had tried to retire earlier that winter but was told she had to wait for USAGM to formally open a window for voluntary retirement; when the email finally came in early March 2025 - just days before Trump's executive order - she filed her paperwork almost immediately, unwilling to risk losing benefits built over 23 years.
She says the transition has been surprisingly painless, psychologically - when people ask what she does, "real estate agent" comes out as naturally now as "journalist" once did.
What she misses isn't the job so much as the people: the colleagues she saw daily at the U.N., the reporters on her old 11 a.m. call with VOA's foreign desk in Washington. She still calls journalism "a vocation, not a job" - the kind of work that prevented her from attending christenings and weddings over the years. The layoffs, she said, show a complete lack of appreciation for those sacrifices.
A 'space for healing'
Valdya Baraputri teared up as she spoke from Dua DC, the coffee shop where she now works as a communications specialist. She built her career as a journalist over 17 years, since she was still in college in Indonesia. Her last live broadcast for VOA aired the night of March 14, 2025, hours before Trump's executive order came down; by the next morning, the Indonesian service she worked for no longer functionally existed. She was briefly brought back and reassigned to VOA's Afghan service, cutting video for broadcasts in Dari and Pashto - languages she doesn't speak a word of - before her contract was terminated at the end of July.
She now helps tell stories about Dua DC, an Indonesian cafe, and about the farmers from her home country who grow the coffee. She said the shop has been a "space for healing" despite the grief she feels about her career being ripped away from her.
"I know we shouldn't tie our identity with what we do, with our job," she said, "but it was me."
She's not sure what the future holds, whether she'll return to journalism one day. She just knows she found a good thing at a good place - and she's still healing.
For Galperovich, taking a retail job seemed like agony. But when a friend asked him what places make him happy, his mind immediately went to his local Trader Joe's - the same one where he now works. He had been a loyal customer there for eight years - long enough to notice how relaxed and genuinely happy the employees always seemed, unlike anywhere else he shopped.
But Galperovich isn't ready to call his 35-year career in journalism over. He still considers it the best profession in the world and says he would take a Russian-language reporting job again in a heartbeat if VOA ever came back in a recognizable way.
For now, though, he's found something he didn't expect to find in a grocery aisle: work that still puts him in front of people, insurance that covers his medication, and colleagues and customers who, in their own way, remind him a little of what he loved about journalism.
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