U.S. judge orders Voice of America staff reinstated, reversing Trump’s shutdown

Signage for US broadcaster Voice of America is seen in Washington, DC, on March 16. (Bonnie Cash/AFP/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

A U.S. federal judge said Tuesday that the Trump administration must let more than 1,000 sidelined Voice of America employees return to work by next week.

The ruling came almost exactly one year after U.S. President Donald Trump set out to dismantle VOA and the rest of the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

VOA, a widely respected U.S.-funded international broadcaster, has been mostly silent since then. Its website is frozen in time, with no updates since March 15, 2025.

But now, according to the court order, VOA’s news reporting and programming must be restored.

In a pair of rulings on Tuesday, Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote that Trump’s pick to manage VOA, Kari Lake, and other defendants “are unlawfully withholding mandatory agency action.”

He said the 1,042 VOA employees who have been on paid administrative leave for the past year must be reinstated by March 23.

Lamberth also threw out all the actions Lake took to follow through on Trump’s order to strip the U.S. Agency for Global Media, USAGM, down to the “minimum presence and function required by law.”

Tuesday’s ruling came ten days after Lamberth ruled that Lake unlawfully ran USAGM for several months last year and voided the mass layoffs that were attempted at that time.

Lake criticized Lamberth and said she would appeal that ruling. She had no immediate reaction to Tuesday’s rulings.

Steve Herman, a VOA veteran who now runs a center for journalism at the University of Mississippi, said the rulings were “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 said, “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 brought by VOA’s sidelined director and three USAGM employees.

The three employees, Patsy Widakuswara, Jessica Jerreat and Kate Neeper, said in a joint statement that they are “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 employees said. “We hope the American people will continue to support our mission to produce journalism, not propaganda.”

By Brian Stelter, CNN