Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.
Can you rebuild a globe-spanning public media agency that has been summarily demolished? The United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM) may soon find out. On Tuesday, Judge Royce Lamberth ordered that more than a thousand employees who had been placed on administrative leave from USAGM a year ago must return to work by Monday.
It’s unclear, however, what this ruling will really mean for the USAGM rank and file. Kate Neeper, USAGM’s director of strategy, told me that staffers’ lawyers are still trying to understand the implications, since the decision followed another, in which Lamberth determined that Kari Lake, who for the past year was serving as the head of USAGM, held that position unlawfully because she did not receive Senate confirmation. Some USAGM staffers might be back in their offices on Monday, and yet its departments, including Voice of America, will hardly resemble the days of old. For one thing, in addition to the employees who were on leave, more than five hundred others had been laid off. “There’s so much damage that she has done to our institution, to our global audience, and to our trust as a reliable international broadcaster,” Patsy Widakuswara, VOA’s White House bureau chief, told me, referring to Lake. “There are three hundred and sixty million people who have lost this voice. It’s going to be a matter of years to undo all the harm.”
For many of those who were dismissed, life has moved on. Except for limited broadcasts in Mandarin, Farsi, Dari, and Pashto, for the past year, VOA has been largely silent. “We are getting paid essentially to do nothing,” Widakuswara told me. Some of her former colleagues have found other roles in media, while many others, she said, “are driving Ubers and working at grocery stores to make ends meet.”
Foreign journalists who were on J-1 visas, which tied their legal status to their employment at VOA, had thirty days to leave the United States. “Many of them had kids in school and home mortgages; others were in the middle of their green-card process,” Neeper told me. The cuts left overseas colleagues in an even more precarious position. “A really important chunk of the workforce, especially in the Voice of America language services, were contract staff who didn’t have the legal protections that us federal employees do,” Neeper said. “At any time, the government could tell them that ‘we’re done,’ with very little recourse.”
The recent twist of fate is a result of a pair of lawsuits. One—filed last March, a week after Trump issued an executive order to eliminate the “non-statutory components and functions” at seven federal agencies, including USAGM—arose from a group of plaintiffs including Widakuswara, Neeper, and Jessica Jerreat, VOA’s press freedom editor, along with four unnamed USAGM employees, federal workers’ unions, and Reporters Without Borders. The other came from Michael Abramowitz, VOA’s director, who filed a suit alleging that the agency’s de facto closure was unlawful. In the months that followed, federal judges repeatedly ordered employees back to work, only for USAGM to repeatedly appeal and fire staff anew.
The Trump administration doesn’t appear to be taking Lamberth’s decision this week as a loss. Anna Kelly, a spokesperson for the White House, told the Washington Post that “efforts to improve efficiency at USAGM have been a tremendous success.” Lamberth’s ruling, she added, “won’t be the final say on the matter.” Lake has yet to challenge the ruling against her tenure, but she has successfully appealed past court decisions. Doing so could send the suit back to the courts and keep staffers at home.
But hurdles remain. Trump has named Sarah B. Rogers, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, as his pick to run USAGM, pending Senate approval. Trump also chose Michael Rigas, a State Department official, to serve as acting CEO, moving Lake to a deputy role. (The moves were intended to comply with Lamberth’s order for USAGM to draw up a “succession plan.”) If Rogers is confirmed—given her senior role at State, that’s no guarantee—she’ll have the authority that Lake had lacked. What that authority allows her to do remains an open question.
The CEO “can’t just trump the statute that governs USAGM,” which requires the agency to deliver accurate and objective news coverage while maintaining a “firewall” protecting editorial independence, Gabe Rottman, the vice president of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told me. “Trump ordered the gutting of the agency in a way that is ‘consistent with the applicable laws.’ In that sense, it could be one of the many executive orders by the administration that doesn’t exactly change anything.”
The appointment of Christopher Wallace, a news director at Newsmax, as VOA’s deputy, as reported by the New York Times on Wednesday, further complicates the future, and raises fresh concerns that the relaunched USAGM could become a propaganda tool.
Lake, meanwhile, will stay on as deputy CEO. Clayton Weimers, the executive director of Reporters Without Borders North America, a coplaintiff on the suit, told me she may well continue running the show. “That would be a pretty clumsy run around Judge Lamberth’s ruling, and it also strikes me as illegal and problematic,” he said. Weimers expects the government to appeal the decision and potentially file a motion for a stay, which would effectively freeze the status quo. “We don’t think this is over by any means,” he added.
Lake did not respond to a request for comment. But on X, she re-shared her own post from March 11. “American Taxpayers don’t want to fund the salaries of activists posing as journalists,” she wrote. “My agency and every government agency must be streamlined, modernized and right-sized. The bureaucrats are fighting back against that.”
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
