On Tuesday, March 17, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to restore the operations of Voice of America, the state-funded broadcaster whose work had been largely shut down a year earlier. The ruling will allow hundreds of employees previously placed on administrative leave to return to work.
U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth gave the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) one week to develop a plan for resuming full-scale Voice of America broadcasting. Since President Trump issued an executive order to halt the broadcaster’s operations, it had been functioning with minimal staffing.
The judge overturned the administration’s decision that had effectively removed 1,042 of Voice of America’s 1,147 employees from their duties and reduced its operations to the “statutory minimum” required by Congress; those measures forced the broadcaster to drastically cut the volume of its programming.
Lamberth called those actions “arbitrary and capricious,” noting that the government had failed to take into account federal laws that clearly define the languages in which Voice of America must broadcast and the regions it is required to serve.
“The defendants have offered nothing even remotely resembling a reasoned explanation for their actions,” Lamberth wrote.
Voice of America has been broadcasting news to countries around the world since its founding during World War II, often in states where there is no tradition of a free press. Before Donald Trump’s executive order, Voice of America broadcast in 49 languages and reached an audience of 362 million people.
