A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore Voice of America, saying the effort to gut the 80-year-old government-funded news service likely violated the law and Constitution.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said the administration’s rush to dismantle the VOA and related news organizations funded by the U.S. Agency for Global Media resulted in the suspension of hundreds of journalists and employees. It put some overseas correspondents at risk of being deported to their home countries, the judge noted. And Lamberth said the silencing of VOA — for the first time in 80 years — also deprived hundreds of millions of listeners of a reliable source of news in parts of the world that lack a free press.
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore Voice of America, saying the effort to gut the 80-year-old government-funded news service likely violated the law and Constitution.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said the administration’s rush to dismantle the VOA and related news organizations funded by the U.S. Agency for Global Media resulted in the suspension of hundreds of journalists and employees. It put some overseas correspondents at risk of being deported to their home countries, the judge noted. And Lamberth said the silencing of VOA — for the first time in 80 years — also deprived hundreds of millions of listeners of a reliable source of news in parts of the world that lack a free press.
Lamberth nodded to that concern, noting that had courts not stepped in multiple times, several of USAGM’s prominent news services might already be gone. He noted that as of now the only operational news service under USAGM is a 33-person unit in the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.
Trump and his allies have decried Voice of America as a bastion of “far-left” ideology and suggested it doesn’t serve U.S. government interests.
Lamberth indicated in his ruling that the sweeping effort to break VOA appeared to be based in part on those views, despite claims that the administration was not targeting First Amendment protected speech.
Lamberth also indicated that the effort was likely a direct breach of the Constitution, saying the administration’s “unwillingness to expend funds in accordance with the congressional appropriations laws is a direct affront to the power of the legislative branch.”
“VOA has been operating under statutory mandate and with steady congressional appropriations for over eighty years, and in so doing, has cultivated an audience of 425 million listeners who rely on VOA’s output — particularly in areas of the world where a free press is otherwise unavailable,” Lamberth wrote. “The Networks have contributed to U.S. international broadcasting by almost exclusively relying on their yearly congressional appropriations, which have been uninterrupted for decades before March 15, 2025. There is no sign that the defendants considered these longstanding reliance interests before taking the sweeping actions at issue here.”
