WASHINGTON (CN) — A federal judge ordered the restoration of Voice of America and several other independent government-funded media outlets on Tuesday, finding that the Trump administration’s dismantling efforts likely violated the separation of powers doctrine.
Senior U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, in a 37-page opinion, granted a preliminary injunction, ordering the U.S. Agency for Global Media to return all its employees and contractors at Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting.
The Ronald Reagan appointee found the administration’s efforts resulted in the suspension of hundreds of journalists and employees, put overseas correspondents at risk of deportation to countries without a free press and deprived hundreds of millions of listeners of a reliable source of news in suppressive nations.
Lamberth said the administration had slimmed the agency down to a size incapable of fulfilling its congressionally mandated functions. The unit still operational is the 33-person Office of Cuba Broadcasting.
“The defendants are likely in violation of numerous federal laws,” Lamberth wrote. “For one VOA’s congressionally established charter in the International Broadcasting Act states that VOA ‘will serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news [that is] accurate, objective and comprehensive,’ but the defendants have silenced VOA for the first time ever.”
VOA was created over 80 years ago to counter Nazi propaganda during World War II with pro-democracy programming and fact-driven journalism, and has not shut down since. The organization has operated through government shutdowns as an essential service.
President Donald Trump targeted VOA and the other media organizations in a March 14 executive order, “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy,” and required its “non-statutory components and functions” be eliminate to the “maximum extent.”
The government’s moves also likely violate congressional appropriations laws, Lamberth said, noting that if the president wants to spend less than the full amount appropriated by Congress for a project or program, he must propose a rescission bill for Congress to approve.
The global media agency could redistribute funding among different programs, but cannot reduce any specific program’s funding by more than 5%, Lamberth noted, and certainly has no power to cut the funding to the degree in this case.
Further, the agency is required to give the House and Senate Appropriations Committees 15-days’ notice, which did not happen.
“The court highlights again here that the defendants’ unwillingness to expend funds in accordance with the congressional appropriations laws is a direct affront to the power of the legislative branch,” Lamberth said.
He added that shutting down the contracts for the media organizations and shutting down VOA run roughshod over “a bulwark of the Constitution” by interfering with congressionally appropriated funds.
While Lamberth declined to rule on the journalists’ First Amendment claims, he noted in a footnote that the government’s argument that it had not engaged in viewpoint discrimination “ironically serve to highlight their arbitrary and capricious approach to whittling down the agency.”
The government has argued that the journalists’ First Amendment rights are not implicated because they stopped all journalist at VOA rather than “singled out any one viewpoint,” Lambert wrote.
“For one, the court finds this argument troubling — it cannot be the case that by shutting down all content at an agency, which current leadership has deemed ‘radical’ and ‘so far to the left,’ the defendants have avoided any First Amendment transgressions,” Lamberth said.
But even if the government was not targeting the media outlets based on viewpoint, their argument concedes that their actions “shut the agency down wholesale” without providing any rational justification for doing so, Lamerth added.
Lamberth also previously temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s effort to cut funding to Radio Free Europe on March 25, similarly finding that the government’s “one sentence of reasoning” was clearly arbitrary. Lamberth has yet to rule on the journalists’ preliminary injunction in that case.
Lamberth was assigned the case after it was transferred from the Southern District of New York, where U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken granted a temporary restraining order barring the global media agency from shuttering its flagship service.
There, the Barack Obama appointee found the Trump administration failed to provide adequate reasoning behind the abrupt and sweeping changes to the media outlets, and was a “classic case” of “arbitrary policymaking.”
The lawsuit is led by VOA White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara and a coalition of editors and journalists at the outlet.
They are joined by the American Federation of Government Employees, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, The NewsGuild-CWA, the American Foreign Service Association and Reporters Without Borders.