A federal decide mentioned Tuesday that the Trump administration should let greater than 1,000 sidelined Voice of America staff return to work by subsequent week.
The ruling got here almost exactly one year after President Donald Trump got down to dismantle VOA and the remaining of the US Agency for Global Media.
VOA, a extensively revered US-funded worldwide broadcaster, has been largely silent since then. Its web site is frozen in time, with no updates since March 15, 2025.
But now, in keeping with the court docket order, VOA’s information reporting and programming should be restored.
In a pair of rulings on Tuesday, Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote that Trump’s decide to handle VOA, Kari Lake, and different defendants “are unlawfully withholding mandatory agency action.”
He mentioned the 1,042 VOA staff who’ve been on paid administrative depart for the previous yr should be reinstated by March 23.
Lamberth additionally threw out all of the actions Lake took to observe by means of on Trump’s order to strip the US Agency for Global Media, USAGM, all the way down to the “minimum presence and function required by law.”
Tuesday’s ruling got here ten days after Lamberth ruled that Lake unlawfully ran USAGM for a number of months final yr and voided the mass layoffs that have been tried at the moment.
Lake criticized Lamberth and mentioned she would attraction that ruling. She had no speedy response to Tuesday’s rulings.
Steve Herman, a VOA veteran who now runs a middle for journalism on the University of Mississippi, mentioned the rulings have been “a comprehensive legal defeat for Elon Musk’s DOGE lackeys, the self-proclaimed USAGM ‘deputy CEO’ Kari Lake and others in the Trump administration who sought to eviscerate the Voice of America.”
If the Trump administration complies with the ruling, Herman mentioned, “there is almost certainly a battle imminent on whether the editorial firewall will be respected, which prohibits partisan skewing of VOA’s journalism.”
Tuesday’s rulings stemmed from lawsuits introduced by VOA’s sidelined director and three USAGM staff.
The three staff, Patsy Widakuswara, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper, mentioned in a joint assertion that they’re “are eager to begin repairing the damage Kari Lake has inflicted on our agency and our colleagues, to return to our congressional mandate, and to rebuild the trust of the global audience we have been unable to serve for the past year.”
“We know the road to restoring VOA’s operations and reputation will be long and difficult,” the workers mentioned. “We hope the American people will continue to support our mission to produce journalism, not propaganda.”