A federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to reverse the layoff notices sent out to nearly all remaining employees at Voice of America, a federal news organization that provides independent reporting to countries with limited press freedom, such as China, Russia and Iran.
In a scathing ruling that accused Trump officials of ignoring and disrespecting the court, Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that the administration had violated his April order to restore Voice of America’s news coverage so that it would “serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news.”
Despite his earlier order, Kari Lake, a fierce Trump ally and a former local TV anchor in Arizona who has led the administration’s efforts to gut Voice of America, and other Trump officials kept the news programming and staffing at the news agency bare bones.
In August, a few days after Judge Lamberth criticized her for potentially violating his order, she moved to lay off 532 full-time journalists and support staff at the agency. All but three radio broadcast technicians were fired, although Voice of America needs those employees to provide radio broadcasting as Congress required, according to court filings.
Those actions have irked Judge Lamberth, who has threatened to hold Ms. Lake in contempt and required her to demonstrate that the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the agency Ms. Lake runs that oversees Voice of America, has complied with his order and the laws Congress passed that required the news group’s continued broadcasting across the world.
On Monday, in ordering the reversal of layoffs, the judge expressed his frustration with what he saw as Ms. Lake’s noncompliance with his April order. He again warned her and other Trump officials that they were risking contempt for failing to continue Voice of America’s news broadcasting across the globe.
“The defendants’ obfuscation of this court’s requests for information,” he wrote, “has wasted precious judicial time and resources and readily support contempt proceedings.”
Judge Lamberth, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, added that he was not ordering a contempt trial only because the Voice of America journalists who sued the administration “have not requested such proceedings” but have only asked for the reversal of layoff notices.
“However, its deference to the plaintiffs with respect to further proceedings should not be mistaken for lenience toward the defendants’ egregious erstwhile conduct,” Judge Lamberth said.
The three plaintiffs representing Voice of America employees, Kate Neeper, Jessica Jerreat and Patsy Widakuswara, said in a joint statement that they were “gratified” by the judge’s ruling.
“We believe the wholesale silencing of V.O.A. broadcasts and the removal of critical staff and expertise go against what Congress intended,” they said.
Ms. Lake, the acting chief executive at the oversight agency, did not respond to requests for comment.
The judge’s order came six months after President Trump signed an executive order that effectively shut down the news group. Voice of America was founded in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda and has since garnered bipartisan support for hastening the fall of Soviet Union by spreading news that its authoritarian government tried to hide, such as the meltdown of a nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in 1986.
In June, even some Republican members of Congress expressed concern with the near shutdown of Voice of America and urged Ms. Lake to continue news broadcasting to U.S. adversaries that suppress press freedom.
Since Mr. Trump ordered its closure, Voice of America has broadcast about an hour per day in four languages: Chinese, Persian and the two languages spoken mainly in Afghanistan, Dari and Pashto. That is a significant reduction from a 24-hour news service that the agency ran before March, when it served more than 360 million people in 49 languages across the world every week.
Monday was not the first time that Ms. Lake’s attempts to lay off hundreds of Voice of America employees faced a roadblock. In June, the layoff documents Ms. Lake’s agency sent included errors including incorrect years of service, birth dates and veteran status. Her agency rescinded the layoff notices a week after they were sent, as those errors could have kicked off a lengthy legal process that could eventually void the layoffs.
In July, the administration moved to fire Voice of America’s director, Mike Abramowitz, after he refused to accept a demotion and a reassignment to North Carolina. Judge Lamberth blocked the firing in August, calling it “unlawful.” The judge found that the termination lacked consent from a bipartisan board that has the sole authority to hire and fire the heads of federally funded news organizations, a firewall intended to buttress their editorial independence.
On Monday, the government argued to Judge Lamberth during a hearing that he must comply with a Supreme Court emergency ruling from July that allowed layoffs at the Education Department to proceed, while such personnel actions get disputed through lower courts.
However, the judge declined to follow the Supreme Court’s decision as a precedent, writing that its emergency ruling was not binding.
Applying the justices’ decision to the Voice of America case would be “letting the government fill in the blanks of the Supreme Court’s emergency rulings, relinquishing the basic judicial task of deciding what the law is,” he wrote.
Minho Kim covers breaking news and climate change for The Times. He is based in Washington.
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