When President Donald Trump asked Voice of America’s White House bureau chief, Patsy Widakuswara, “Who are you with?” last March, her heart sank.
The question could mean trouble, and for a VOA journalist, the stakes felt especially high. The Heritage Foundation devoted a chapter of Project 2025 — the conservative think tank’s road map for the second Trump administration — to dismantling the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees VOA. Widakuswara had just cautioned her team of reporters against asking questions that would draw attention to their outlet.
And yet Widakuswara ran afoul of her own warning, asking whether Trump and the Irish prime minister would discuss a possible expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. A brief yet heated exchange ensued:
“Nobody is expelling any Palestinians. I don’t know — Who are you with?”
“I’m with Voice of America, sir.”
“Oh, no wonder.”
The president answered her question, but his response worried her. “It made me feel, ‘Oh s—,’” Widakuswara recalled in an interview Wednesday, just more than a year since that exchange. “You know, am I just attracting unwanted attention?”
Two days after the dustup, Trump signed an executive order aimed at winding down the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which funds global broadcasting nonprofits and oversees Voice of America. Kari Lake, a former television news anchor, whom Trump had charged with leading the agency, put more than 1,000 employees on administrative leave and fired hundreds of contractors.
The outcome felt preordained, Widakuswara said: “We already had a target on us.”
A spokesman for USAGM did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For more than a year, the outlet has been at a standstill, the vast majority of its employees on leave while the Trump administration battled in the courts to shrink the agency to its “statutory minimum.”
A Tuesday ruling finding the wind-down of USAGM unlawful ends a year-long saga that had essentially shuttered Voice of America, a tool of diplomatic soft power founded during World War II to deliver news to Nazi propaganda. VOA’s website still says it broadcasts in 49 languages to a weekly audience of more than 361 million people. However, under Trump and Lake, only a few broadcasts — including Persian, Dari, Pashto and Mandarin — have been active.
But restoring broadcasts is only the first step. Rebuilding trust after a lost year may take far longer, staffers say.
Although the ruling may restart VOA, it does not erase a year of disruption — or answer how quickly it can regain its footing abroad.
‘America’s adversaries — not its citizens’
The executive order landed late at night on a Friday, and the chaos was immediate. Lake, who worked closely with staffers from the U.S. DOGE Service, signed termination notifications for hundreds of contractors. Journalists who showed up to work to broadcast their programs were locked out of the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building. About 1,000 employees were placed on indefinite administrative leave — still collecting government paychecks, but barred from doing their jobs.
Lake quickly terminated grant agreements with a roster of nonprofit organizations funded by USAGM: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks, and the Open Technology Fund.
Trump — who has sparred with, insulted and sued private news organizations throughout his political career — had long spoken about VOA with suspicion. “VOA too often speaks for America’s adversaries — not its citizens,” read a White House statement during Trump’s first term. In 2020, Trump installed Michael Pack, a documentary filmmaker, to reshape the broadcaster’s coverage. Critics alleged he was aiming to turn the outlet, which prides itself on editorial independence from the government, into a tool of propaganda. A federal judge intervened to halt Pack’s involvement in news coverage.
Lake, a former Arizona television anchor turned die-hard MAGA politician, initially appeared supportive of VOA’s mission. “VOA has been telling America’s story to the world for 83 years,” Lake said in a February 2025 speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). “Now, sometimes the coverage has been incredible, and sometimes it’s been pitiful. We are fighting an information war, and there is no better weapon than the truth, and I believe VOA can be that weapon.”
She pledged that VOA would not become “Trump TV” on her watch. But after Trump’s executive order in March, which Lake later testified she learned about the day it was signed, she changed her tune.
“This agency and its outlets are largely incompetent, corrupt, biased and a threat to America’s national security and standing in the world,” she told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in June.
Hours after the executive order came through, Widakuswara and her colleagues were setting up Signal groups — their work emails had been cut off. Weeks later, Widakuswara became a plaintiff in one of two lawsuits against the Trump administration; the other was filed by Michael Abramowitz, VOA’s director.
Both lawsuits prevailed Tuesday in federal court when U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a fiery 82-year-old Ronald Reagan appointee who has repeatedly clashed with Lake, found that the plan to shrink the agency was illegal because it violated federal administrative law. Earlier this month, Lamberth ruled that Lake had run USAGM illegally and voided months of her decisions, including a mass layoff plan.
The new ruling ordered VOA to resume broadcasting and directed the agency to bring back more than 1,000 employees, including Widakuswara, by March 23.
He also lambasted Lake’s lack of cooperation during the court proceedings as a “Hallmark production in bad faith.” The government has not yet indicated that it will appeal the latest ruling.
Mark Schoeff Jr., president of the National Press Club, celebrated Lamberth’s ruling. “Silencing journalists weakens democracy at home and abroad,” he said. “The court has made clear that you don’t get to turn off a free press when coverage becomes inconvenient.”
In coming days, the government will need to bring back employees at Voice of America and its parent agency, and figure out how to resume broadcasting after a largely inactive year.
For Widakuswara and her fellow plaintiffs, who include Jessica Jerreat, VOA’s press freedom editor, and Kate Neeper, USAGM’s director of strategy and performance assessment, the past year has been anything but idle. Rather than doing their usual jobs, they have focused on the lawsuit: explaining their work to lawyers, explaining the litigation to co-workers, running a public social media campaign to “Save VOA,” and helping colleagues through a tumultuous year.
“I think the three of us were probably busier this year than we were in our normal jobs,” Widakuswara said. “I start working usually at seven, and I don’t finish.”
Neeper spent much of the year focused on a quieter crisis: colleagues who lost their immigration status when their contracts were terminated. Because many VOA journalists had come to the United States specifically to work for the agency — often from countries where they could not safely return — the end of their contracts triggered visa countdowns.
Later in the year, USAGM ended its own visa program entirely, affecting full-time employees, too. “We’ve been working with a number of them to figure out immigration situations, figure out places that they can live that will be safe,” Neeper said.
The contractors remain in a particularly precarious situation — and are not covered by Lamberth’s ruling. “They’re critical,” Neeper said. “There’s no language service at VOA that could function without contractors.”
Widakuswara and Neeper say they’re still waiting for the government to bring them back. And it’s unclear what they’ll return to. “Restoring the infrastructure — from badges to get in, to equipment, to satellite, to wire subscriptions — it’s going to take a lot of money and some time,” Widakuswara said.
After Lamberth said Lake could no longer run USAGM, Trump nominated a State Department official, Sarah B. Rogers, as chief executive of the agency, a position requiring Senate confirmation. Lake has said she will remain as deputy CEO. Rogers said that, if confirmed, she would not give up her State Department job as under secretary for public diplomacy and would do both jobs concurrently.
The hardest thing to rebuild may be the trust of VOA’s global audience, said Kelu Chao, who served as USAGM’s deputy CEO until January 2025. The agency’s credibility — built over eight decades — has taken a serious hit. “We probably lost forever the opportunity to explain America and world affairs during this year,” she said. She said she worries that state propaganda from Russia and China have filled the voids left by VOA.
“What I think will be really challenging is overcoming the trauma that the journalists and the staff have gone through,” Widakuswara said, “and making sure that all of us can continue to work … and not be worried about the administration over our shoulder.”
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