A federal judge has blocked Voice of America CEO Kari Lake from firing 500 employees and warned in a blistering decision that her agency’s “disrespect” toward the court merited a trial for civil contempt.
Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, wrote that the only reason he was not initiating contempt proceedings was that the plaintiffs in the case hadn’t asked for them.
The court’s decision not to pursue contempt of its own accord “should not be mistaken for lenience toward the defendants’ egregious erstwhile conduct,” he wrote.
In March, the congressionally established U.S. Agency for Global Media—overseen by Lake, a former anchor for a Fox affiliate in Arizona—moved to fire about 600 of its 1,040 full-time employees and place another 400 on administrative leave.
The move, which was in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump, left just 100 employees to run the agency’s global operations, including its worldwide Voice of America news programming.
The employees sued to keep their jobs, and in April, the court issued a preliminary injunction that found the firings arbitrary, capricious, and not in accordance with the law.
The ruling instructed USAGM to rehire its employees and contractors, and it also required USAGM to restore Voice of America’s programming in accordance with the agency’s legal mandate to “serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news.”
More than a month later, though, Voice of America remained “silent.” Lamberth wrote in his decision. On June 23, the court granted a motion requiring the government to show how it had complied with the original injunction.
In the meantime, the agency began running only limited content. At an Aug. 25 hearing, the government’s lawyers said “maybe” there would “eventually” be more firings, but there was “uncertainty” about how many.
Hours later, the administration moved to lay off an additional 500 employees and strip them of their protective bargaining rights. Given the timing, it “strains credibility” to think the firings were “uncertain” or a mere “possibility,” as government lawyers repeatedly told the court, wrote Lamberth, who has served with the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia since 1987.
The revelation came during September depositions with three Voice of America executives, including Lake, that showed the administration never planned to follow the court’s original orders, he concluded.
“The court no longer harbors any doubt that defendants lack a plan to comply with the preliminary injunction, and instead have been running out the clock on the fiscal year while remaining in violation of even the most meager reading of USAGM and Voice of America’s statutory obligations,” Lamberth wrote.
The Daily Beast has reached out to USAGM for comment.
Lee Saunders, president of AFSCME, the union that represents many of the employees involved in the lawsuit, told the Daily Beast in a statement that the ruling was a “major victory” for Voice of America workers and for “those across the globe who depend on” their reporting.
“We will continue to fight back against this administration’s attempts to punish Voice of America workers simply for doing their jobs of telling the truth,” Lee said.
Federal law requires Voice of America to issue radio broadcasts in specific languages in order to circumvent internet restrictions in countries like China, North Korea, and Russia, but the agency isn’t broadcasting in Mandarin, Russian, or Korean.
The law also requires the agency to provide information about developments “in each significant region of the world” and to produce content reflecting “a variety of opinions and voices” from areas plagued by censorship.
When it comes to those requirements, “The defendants thumb their noses at Congress’s commands and give responses that are dripping with indifference to their statutory obligations,” Lamberth wrote.
Asked whether the continent of Africa, where Voice of America has ceased all operations, counts as a “significant region of the world” for statutory purposes, Lake admitted under questioning that she hadn’t “given it a lot of thought.”
She also confessed to not “having an opinion” on the question of which Asian countries lack adequate sources of free information.
“These responses are the height of arbitrariness,” Lamberth wrote, noting that the additional firings would “cement” Voice of America’s noncompliance with the law.
The lay-offs targeted all of the agency’s radio master control technicians and all but three radio broadcast technicians, even though Voice of America can’t operate without radio engineers.
