US Judge Blocks Trump’s Mass Layoff Of VOA Staff

A United States national justice has temporarily halted Donald Trump administration’s program to laic disconnected much than 500 employees of the Voice of America (VOA), ruling that the determination violated earlier tribunal orders and threatened the agency’s mission.

In a determination delivered connected Monday, US District Judge Royce Lamberth suspended the terminations, which were acceptable to instrumentality effect connected September 30. The layoffs had been announced successful August by Kari Lake, a elder advisor to the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), who has led President Donald Trump’s efforts to overhaul government-funded media.

“The Reduction successful Force announced by Defendant Lake connected oregon astir August 29, 2025, is SUSPENDED and whitethorn NOT beryllium implemented… until this Court has ruled connected the plaintiffs’ Motion,” Lamberth wrote successful his ruling, citing further ineligible proceedings scheduled for adjacent month.

The justice noted that hundreds of VOA employees received termination notices successful June, pursuing what helium described arsenic the Trump administration’s unprecedented determination to frost the broadcaster — the archetypal specified determination since its instauration successful 1942.

In his 19-page order, Lamberth recalled that the tribunal had already issued a preliminary injunction successful April, uncovering that Lake’s actions were “arbitrary and capricious and not successful accordance with law.” Monday’s ruling, helium explained, was meant to “facilitate the injunction and reconstruct VOA’s programming truthful that the USAGM fulfills its statutory mandate.”

Lake, however, defended the layoffs arsenic necessary. She argued that the June notices were portion of a “long-overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy.”

The tribunal pushed backmost strongly, accusing Lake and different defendants of resisting efforts to find whether they had developed a compliance plan.

“The Court nary longer harbours immoderate uncertainty that defendants deficiency a program to comply with the preliminary injunction, and alternatively person been moving retired the timepiece connected the fiscal twelvemonth portion remaining successful usurpation of… statutory obligations,” Lamberth wrote.

Founded during the Second World War, VOA and its sister outlets nether USAGM , including Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, person agelong been tools of US brushed power, tasked with promoting ideology and countering overseas propaganda.

Trump has often lashed retired astatine US-funded media, dismissing VOA’s editorial independency and accusing the broadcaster of being excessively captious of his administration.