A federal judge has dealt a blow to Kari Lake’s shakeup of Voice of America (VOA).
District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, ruled Thursday that Lake cannot oust VOA Director Michael Abramowitz without the approval of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board—a bipartisan panel that President Donald Trump nuked in January.
Earlier this month, Lake fired Abramowitz when he refused to accept a reassignment as chief management officer of a transmitting station in North Carolina, arguing that she needed approval from the now-defunct advisory board.
Abramowitz sued Lake over his termination and her broader efforts to dismantle the international broadcasting service, which is funded by the United States government and has been criticized by conservatives as left-wing. The White House has dubbed VOA the “Voice of Radical America.”
Since she was named senior White House adviser in March, Lake has been hard at work carrying out Trump’s executive order paring down the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), VOA’s parent agency.
Established in 1942, VOA produces news in nearly 50 languages, reaching hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The organization is protected by a “firewall” that bars the United States government from interfering in its operations.
Trump, however, took aim at VOA over a laundry list of stories he branded as “radical propaganda,” including a 2019 segment about transgender migrants seeking to enter the U.S. and a 2020 video that conservatives claim favored then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden.
In June, Lake told lawmakers that “reform was not possible” at the USAGM.
“This agency and its outlets are largely incompetent, corrupt, biased, and a threat to America’s national security and standing in the world,” she said.
Lake has so far gutted 1,400 positions at the USAGM, including hundreds of staff at VOA.
The sweeping cuts have raised eyebrows even within Republican circles, prompting a panel chaired by MAGA loyalist Sen. Lindsey Graham to launch an investigation into accusations that she misused congressionally appropriated funds.
The investigation comes on the heels of a July order in which Lamberth himself branded Lake’s mass layoffs as a “waste.”
“[W]hen Congress appropriated $260 million to VOA for [fiscal year] 2025, it did not anticipate that such a significant sum of taxpayer funds would be used to pay employees to sit at home for months on end,” Lamberth wrote. “The legal term for that is ‘waste,’ and it is precisely what federal appropriation law aims to avoid.”
Lake, a former Fox anchor who flamed out of two races for Arizona governor, maintained in a declaration filed in federal court earlier this month that her slash-and-burn approach was “within the bounds of current and future federal law.”
She remains hellbent on showing the door to international journalists who worked for VOA, telling the right-wing network Real America’s Voice, “Their time here is up. And I said before, if I have to go to the airport with them, and accompany them to the airport and get them on the flight, I will do that.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to USAGM for comment.
