A federal judge on Saturday ruled that the appointment of Kari Lake, the head of Voice of America’s oversight agency, was invalid, voiding mass layoffs that she had carried out at the federally funded news group last year.
The decision from Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia was a major rejection of President Trump’s attempts to dismantle the storied government-funded news group, which was founded to combat Nazi propaganda.
If upheld by higher courts, Judge Lamberth’s ruling would allow more than 1,000 journalists and support staff members at the news group to return to their jobs. Ms. Lake, who had been leading the U.S. Agency for Global Media, V.O.A.’s parent agency, said that she would appeal the decision.
Before Mr. Trump pushed to close the agency and influence its editorial decisions, Voice of America broadcast in 49 languages and had more than 360 million weekly listeners around the world, providing news services to foreign countries with limited press freedoms, such as China, Russia and Iran.
In his ruling, Judge Lamberth called Mr. Trump’s decision to have Ms. Lake lead the global media agency without Senate confirmation or appropriate procedures required for an acting head “violence to the statutory and constitutional scheme.”
The judge found that Ms. Lake’s appointment violated the law that determines who can serve as an acting head of an agency whose permanent leader would require Senate confirmation. The law, the Vacancies Act, requires that an acting head must be the second senior officer of an agency, be appointed by the president with the Senate’s consent or be a senior officer who had been at the agency before a vacancy arose.
Judge Lamberth found that Ms. Lake did not satisfy those conditions.
Ms. Lake claimed that she had not assumed the official title of the acting chief executive of the media agency, but rather, that the authority of its chief executive position had been delegated to her. That allowed her to exercise sweeping power over layoffs, funding cuts and contract terminations at the news agency, she said.
But the judge rejected her argument, writing that “allowing the president to circumvent Congress’s carefully crafted limitations” through delegations would violate the spirit of the Constitution.
In a statement, Ms. Lake called Judge Lamberth, an 82-year-old appointee of President Ronald Reagan, “an activist judge” who had been “trying to stand in the way” of Mr. Trump’s push to “cut bloated bureaucracy, eliminate waste and restore accountability to government.”
The journalists and support staff members at Voice of America who sued the Trump administration expressed hope on Saturday that broadcasting at the news organization would return to levels seen before last March, when Mr. Trump and Ms. Lake moved to shutter it.
“We feel vindicated and deeply grateful,” Patsy Widakuswara, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper, three of the plaintiffs, said in a statement, in which they vowed to continue fighting for “restoring V.O.A.’s global operations and ensuring we continue to produce journalism, not propaganda.”
Ms. Widakuswara and Ms. Jerreat are journalists on paid leave from Voice of America. Ms. Neeper is on paid leave from the U.S. Agency for Global Media.
Minho Kim reports on breaking news for The Times from Washington.
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