A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from dismantling the Voice of America, the U.S.-run international broadcasting service.
U.S. District Court Judge J. Paul Oetke granted a temporary restraining order to a group of VOA employees who brought the case.
Read the judge’s Voice of America order.
The plaintiffs were joined in the litigation by other groups, including Reporters Without Borders, unions and the American Foreign Service Association.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration put almost the entire staff of VOA on leave, largely halting its operations. It followed a Trump executive order on March 14 to eliminate the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the agency that oversees VOA and government-funded other broadcasting networks, to all but their statutory functions.
The judge’s order bars the Trump administration from taking any further actions to “implement or effectuate” the executive order and a subsequent email that put much of the VOA staff on leave.
“The dismantling of USAGM would clearly cause employees, contractors, and grantees irreparable harm,” the judge wrote. “And Plaintiffs have offered sufficient evidence that Defendants are doing just that.”
The administration’s actions have left more than 1,200 VOA journalists, editors, engineers and other employees sidelined. VOA has a budget of about $270 million.
Oetke wrote, “By terminating and threatening to terminate the majority of USAGM staff, cancelling grants to its grantee networks abroad, and shutting down the transmitters that serve as the conduits for any radio programming to listeners abroad, Defendants have failed to carry out the clear, specific statutory mandates of the agency’s governing statute. None of the statutory requirements enumerated above can be effectuated if the agency has been shuttered. And Defendants have failed to persuade the Court that their actions have been sufficiently narrow in scope such that USAGM is somehow still operational.”
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit claimed that Trump’s team, led by Kari Lake, “usurped Congressional power and acted arbitrarily” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. They also claimed that the Trump administration violated a law that ensured that there would be a “firewall” to ensure the editorial integrity of VOA and other networks.
“The disturbing result: In many parts of the world a crucial source of objective news is gone, and only censored state-sponsored news media is left to fill the void,” the plaintiffs said in their lawsuit.
The judge wrote in his order that “shutting down necessary systems, laying off personnel, and terminating contracts, even ones that might be able to be eventually reinstated, halt agency function in the short term and threaten the efficacy of the agency in the long-term. It would take USAGM months, if not years, to piece back together the infrastructure, staff, and contractual relationships to fully function again after this damage is done. In short, these harms cannot be remedied with mere money damages.”
