The Trump administration on Friday rescinded the layoff notices it had sent to employees at Voice of America after employees discovered errors in documents detailing the terms that could later nullify or significantly delay President Trump’s attempts to gut the news organization.
The email rescinding last week’s layoff notices was sent by Voice of America’s human resources office to employees based in Washington, where around 90 percent of its union-protected employees reside, according to the layoff plan the Trump administration sent to Congress earlier this month.
But those reporters and support staff are not being called back to work, and Voice of America’s parent agency, U.S. Agency for Global Media, “will be running another RIF in the near future,” the email said, referring to federal layoffs with the acronym for “reductions in force.” Hundreds of journalists and support staff at Voice of America had been scheduled to be laid off on Sept. 1.
Kari Lake, a close Trump ally and the senior adviser to the global media agency, is leading the effort to gut Voice of America. She said in an email that her plan to reduce the agency’s work force by 85 percent “has remained unchanged.”
“The email that went out today allows employees to access and update their personnel files ahead of completion of the RIF,” Ms. Lake said.
The Trump administration has accused Voice of America of spreading partisan “propaganda,” calling it “the voice of Radical America.”
In March, the president signed an executive order that effectively called for the dismantling of the global media agency, and put nearly all Voice of America reporters on paid leave, ceasing its operations for the first time since its founding in 1942. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump urged Republican lawmakers to “kill” Voice of America, dubbing it a “Democrat mouthpiece.”
But the effort appears to have suffered a setback because of critical administrative errors in how the administration has handled the layoff procedure.
Some layoff documents sent last week had errors including incorrect years of service, birth dates and veteran status, according to several Voice of America employees who received files that contained inaccuracies.
Patsy Widakuswara, a Voice of America reporter who is leading a lawsuit against Ms. Lake and her agency, said in a statement that Trump officials were “failing at running an international media organization, and it seems they are failing at firing us too.” She added: “In the meantime, more than 600 people are experiencing whiplash from their incompetence.”
Ms. Lake’s agency had to rescind the layoff notices because many of those errors violated the union contract, said Paula Hickey, the president of the local chapter of the American Federation of Government Employees, the federal workers’ union that represents Voice of America employees. If those errors were not fixed, the union could bring a complaint or start an arbitration process, which could eventually nullify the layoffs.
Ms. Hickey said Ms. Lake’s agency also failed to finish the bargaining with the union and “maintain the status quo,” which is required by the law that governs the relationship between the federal government and employees. The rescinding of layoff notices on Friday came after the union notified the global media agency of the errors and violations.
In 2011, the global media agency was ordered to rehire employees it had laid off years earlier and give them full back pay for that period, after a federal arbitrator found that the layoffs were done incorrectly.
Grant Turner, a former chief executive of the global media agency during Mr. Trump’s first term, said that Ms. Lake did not seem to have carefully reviewed the procedure before the Voice of America layoff notices were sent last week.
Mr. Turner, who led a layoff process in 2022, said it took him a year to complete it, as the process of laying off federal workers often takes months of careful review. He added that the governing laws, regulations and union contracts were extremely complicated.
“When you try to ruin people’s lives without any justification,” he said, criticizing Ms. Lake’s way of conducting layoffs, “there’s often a bill to pay when the law catches up with you.”
Minho Kim covers breaking news and climate change for The Times. He is based in Washington.
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