During an Oval Office media session on Mar. 12, a reporter asked the visiting Irish prime minister, Micheál Martin, about President Donald Trump’s proposal to expel Palestinians from Gaza so that the territory can be turned into a Mediterranean resort. Before Martin could respond, Trump interrupted to say, “Nobody is expelling any Palestinians.” Then Trump asked the reporter, “Who are you with?”
“I’m with Voice of America, sir,” the reporter, Patsy Widakuswara, answered.
“Oh, no wonder,” Trump responded in a scoffing tone, waving his right hand dismissively.
Two days after the Oval Office exchange, Trump issued an executive order instructing that VOA’s parent agency be reduced “to the minimum presence and function required by law.” The order was followed by a White House press release entitled, “The Voice of Radical America,” which stated that “taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.” On Mar. 15, nearly all VOA employees, more than 1,300 people, were put on administrative leave. One day later, 500 VOA contractors were terminated.
For the first time in 83 years, Voice of America went silent — and it remains so today.
VOA is no longer reaching its audience of more than 360 million people around the world with broadcast and digital content in 49 languages. It is not countering Vladimir Putin’s disinformation with professionally reported news in Russian for Russian audiences. Nor is it providing information in Chinese for citizens of China. It is no longer producing news in Arabic or Persian for people living in autocracies throughout the Middle East.
At least four lawsuits have been filed seeking to reverse the Trump administration’s attempt to destroy VOA and several affiliated U.S. agencies that broadcast internationally. Two of the suits – one in Washington, D.C. and the other in New York – have already led to judicial rulings temporarily ordering the administration to stop what it is doing. The rulings rely not on First Amendment free speech or press protections but on findings that the president and his appointees intruded on congressional authority in violation of the constitutional principle of separation of powers and of the Administrative Procedure Act.
This choice of legal reasoning by federal district court judges — one a nominee of former President Ronald Reagan, the other of former President Barack Obama — could be important as the cases move through a likely appeal process. That process could culminate with a hearing before a Supreme Court controlled by a six-justice conservative majority that includes three Trump nominees and two other justices, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, both of whom have proven to be reliably friendly to the administration.
However the courts ultimately rule, the Trump White House appears to be hell bent on crushing VOA, a storied journalism organization founded as part of the fight against Nazism. The broadcasting network later expanded to counter communist Cold War propaganda and 21st century disinformation spread by the Kremlin and other dictatorial regimes. If the judiciary blocks the administration’s unilateral assault on VOA, Trump may pressure congressional Republicans to choke off the outlet’s funding by legislative means.
In the meantime, the VOA litigation is worth unpacking. The suits shed light on the broader multi-front battle unfolding in the federal courts over the Trump administration’s campaign to undermine congressional authority and the rule of law more generally.
Trump’s Animosity Toward VOA
Trump’s animosity toward VOA long predates the Oval Office episode with the Irish prime minister. During his first term, Trump installed a conservative filmmaker named Michael Pack as the chief executive of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the parent body that oversees VOA and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (also known as Radio y TV Martí), which are government entities. The USAGM also provides funding to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and the Middle East Broadcasting Networks, which are taxpayer-supported private nonprofits. Pack wreaked havoc during his short-lived tenure by dismissing the heads of the broadcasting networks and appointing new leadership, including of VOA, whose director had resigned prior to Pack’s assuming the CEO role.
In that now seemingly distant time — five years ago — some Republicans in Congress joined Democrats in trying to stop the partisan undermining of VOA and its affiliates. Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Susan Collins of Maine, and Marco Rubio of Florida (now, of course, Trump’s secretary of state), joined Democrats in sending a letter of protest in July 2020. “Congress set up these networks, and its governance structure at the USAGM, to preserve the grantees’ independence so they can act as a bulwark against disinformation through credible journalism,” the bipartisan letter stated.
Bipartisan support for U.S. government journalism and broadcasting dates to VOA’s founding in 1942 as a means of countering Nazi propaganda by providing truthful reporting about World War II — in German for German citizens. Congress codified the VOA’s role in a 1948 statute. By then, the outlet was being reformulated as a component of U.S. Cold War conflict with the Soviet Union and its allies.
A 1976 statute formalizing VOA’s charter described its mission as providing “a balanced and comprehensive projection of significant American thought and institutions.” Various laws have established what came to be called a “firewall” between the VOA’s journalism activities and executive branch whim. In the 1994 International Broadcasting Act, for example, Congress directed the organization to provide journalism that is “consistently reliable and authoritative, accurate, objective, and comprehensive,” especially in regions suffering “censorship and oppression.”
In the wake of the first Trump administration’s attempt to undermine the USAGM, Congress reiterated the firewall concept by insulating journalists working for VOA and its affiliates in the January 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which was passed by overwhelming bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate. In 2024, Congress appropriated more than $857 million for the USAGM, with $230 million allocated for VOA. That funding has been extended by continuing resolution, most recently in a bill signed by President Trump on Mar. 15, even as he effectively shut down the organizations.
The conservative movement has made no secret of its hostility to VOA and its affiliates. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint alleged that VOA had joined “the mainstream media’s anti-U.S. chorus” by “denigrating the American story — all in the name of so-called journalistic independence.” The Project 2025 authors added that VOA “content during the [first] Trump Administration was rife with typical mainstream media talking points assailing the President and his staff.” The first Trump White House had, for example, attacked VOA for failing, in the administration’s estimation, to reinforce the administration’s position blaming China for the Covid-19 pandemic.
In Dec. 2024, Trump announced that he would appoint Kari Lake to lead VOA. He claimed she would “ensure that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.” Trump effectively shut down the outlet before she formally took over.
Lake now serves as “senior advisor” to the acting chief executive of the USAGM. A page on the USAGM website, adorned with a large photograph of Lake, states: “This agency is not salvageable. From top-to-bottom this agency is a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer—a national security risk for this nation—and irretrievably broken.”
Proponents of VOA and its affiliates are fighting back in court. Arguments offered in filings in four pending cases include that the shutdowns violate First Amendment free speech and press rights, the constitutional separation of powers, and the Administrative Procedure Act. But not all these arguments are equally strong; some are more likely to succeed in court than others.
Potential Weaknesses in First Amendment Arguments
Patsy Widakuswara, the White House bureau chief, and a group of other VOA journalists have joined with a quartet of unions representing VOA employees and the nonprofit Reporters Sans Frontières and its U.S. affiliate to sue the Trump administration in a New York federal court. Their complaint emphasizes the administration’s alleged interference with free speech and the press. “What is happening to the VOA journalists,” the plaintiffs argue, “is not just chilling of First Amendment speech; it is a government shut down of journalism, a prior restraint that kills content before it can be created.” VOA journalists, the complaint continues, have been deprived “of their ability to engage in news gathering and reporting of the news, or to author and disseminate editorial works of opinion, criticism, and human interest as part of their work at the VOA because of the content and perceived viewpoint of their reporting.”
The First Amendment argument has an intuitive appeal. The Trump administration suppressed speech — and journalistic work in particular — when it turned off the radio transmitters and shut down the computer servers at VOA, furloughed its employees, and fired its contractors. In fact, a group of career civil servants at USAGM and VOA successfully used a version of this argument when they filed suit to stop the first Trump administration from mismanaging and otherwise interfering with the organizations.
In 2020, a federal district court judge in Washington, D.C. granted this earlier group of plaintiffs a temporary restraining order, finding that USAGM leadership had violated their “First Amendment rights by taking or influencing personnel actions against individual journalists or editors, attempting directly to monitor VOA and network content through communications with individual editors or journalists, and undertaking their own investigations of alleged discrete breaches of journalistic ethics.”
But as enticing as the First Amendment angle might seem, it has a potential weakness when offered in response to the current Trump administration’s move not just to influence journalistic personnel decisions or monitor content, but also to essentially eliminate the VOA and its affiliates altogether. After all, these outlets are creatures of government, not freestanding media organizations akin to The New York Times or CNN. Based on shifting priorities or budget constraints, Congress could decide through the ordinary legislative process simply to eliminate funding for VOA, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the rest. The First Amendment does not guarantee that government-sponsored journalism, once launched, will continue forever.
The temporary restraining order entered by the D.C. district court in 2020 became irrelevant as a practical matter when Joe Biden succeeded Trump as president. The leadership and activity of USAGM and its constituent journalism outlets took a turn back toward normality. But it’s far from obvious that the district court’s First Amendment-based reasoning in 2020 would have been upheld had it been brought before the current Supreme Court’s six-member conservative supermajority.
There are other legal arguments that offer a more promising basis for reversing the second Trump administration’s assault on VOA and its affiliates.
Separation of Powers
Article I, Section 1, of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress. The Trump administration’s attempt to shutter VOA violates the bedrock constitutional principle of the separation of powers between the legislative and executive branches of government. Supplementing its First Amendment claims, the employees’ suit in New York asserts this argument, and it was vigorously embraced by U.S. District Judge J. Paul Oetken, who granted the plaintiffs a temporary restraining order on Mar. 28.
An Obama appointee, Oetken notably did not address the free speech argument. Instead, he ruled that by defying lawmakers’ clearly established determination to create and fund an international broadcasting operation to serve U.S. foreign policy interests, the Trump administration “is usurping Congress’s power of the purse and its legislative supremacy.” Summarizing precedent from various federal courts of appeal, he added that “the President does not have unilateral authority to refuse to spend the funds” appropriated by Congress.
A different group of VOA journalists and the outlet’s recently ousted director, Michael Abramowitz, make a similar argument in a separate lawsuit filed in federal court in Washington, D.C. ( Note: Abramowitz and I have been friends since we worked on our college newspaper together in the early 1980s.)
Referring to the numerous congressional authorizations and appropriations that created, shaped, and sustained VOA and its affiliates over the years, the plaintiffs in the Abramowitz suit argue that by “placing all of VOA’s employees on administrative leave, noticing the terminations of approximately forty percent of its workforce, including key journalists, and shuttering VOA’s broadcasting and reporting functions, [the Trump administration] defendants have effectively repealed duly enacted legislation that requires USAGM to respect VOA’s newsroom activities and requires that VOA continue broadcasting and producing news.”
The Administrative Procedure Act
Buttressing the separation-of-powers argument is one based on the Administrative Procedure Act (APA). Under that statute, a reviewing court has the authority to set aside an executive branch action that it determines to be “arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law.” The APA, in other words, obliges an agency to explain policy changes in a reasoned manner.
Judge Oetken determined that the Trump administration failed to meet this obligation. He found that it provided only “a single sentence of explanation for the colossal changes that have occurred at USAGM since March 15, 2025.” The administration, he added, merely stated that the lay-offs and grantee contract terminations were based on the presidential executive order. “This single line, devoid of data or any independent explanation, is grossly insufficient and falls far short of reasoned analysis,” the judge wrote.
The potential potency of the APA claim is illustrated in yet another case pending in federal court in Washington, a narrower one brought on behalf of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). The Central Intelligence Agency launched RFE/RL in 1950 to counter communist propaganda in Eastern Europe. Congress began appropriating money for the outlet in 1973, enabling it to operate since then as a nonprofit funded by grants disbursed by USAGM. Prior to the Trump administration’s interference with its operations, it was broadcasting in 27 languages reaches audiences totaling more than 47 million people in 23 countries in Europe, Central and South Asia, and the Middle East.
On Mar. 25, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued a temporary restraining order blocking the defunding of RFE/RL based on his finding that the Trump administration likely violated the APA. Appointed by President Ronald Reagan, Judge Lamberth ruled that “the ‘explanation’ offered by USAGM can scarcely be characterized as an explanation: it amounted to one line in the termination letter stating that ‘the award [to RFE/RL] no longer effectuates agency priorities.’” This “conclusory statement, unsupported by any facts or reasoning,” the judge wrote, “is not a ‘satisfactory explanation’ and offers no ‘rational connection between the facts found and the choices made.’”
The APA’s demand that executive branch agencies make decisions in a reasoned, legible fashion intertwines with the principle of separation of powers. Pointing to the International Broadcasting Act of 1994, Judge Lamberth explained that “Congress has enshrined into law that ‘[i]t is in the interest of the United States to support broadcasting to other nations.’” The judge pointed out that RFE/RL has served this mission for the past seventy-five years, evolving from a “vehicle” for combating “communist propaganda” to one that responds “to threats to democracy and media freedom across the globe.”
Judge Lamberth concluded that “the leadership of USAGM cannot, with one sentence of reasoning offering virtually no explanation, force RFE/RL to shut down—even if the President has told them to do so.”
The Litigation Continues
These are not the final words in the RFE/RL or VOA cases. Despite Judge Lamberth’s ruling, as of the first week in April, the Trump administration had failed to release funding for RFE/RL, forcing the network to furlough staff and cut programming. Meanwhile, two other USAGM grant recipients have filed suit. On Mar. 27, Radio Free Asia sued in federal court in Washington seeking to restore its funding. On Apr. 1, the Middle East Broadcasting Networks filed a similar suit in D.C.
The Trump administration’s next moves are uncertain, but it seems unlikely that it will retreat permanently or entirely from its assault on the government’s longstanding journalism apparatus. In filings due in coming days and weeks, the administration will probably assert an interpretation of executive branch authority under Article II of the Constitution in its attempt to rationalize and act on the president’s animus toward VOA and its affiliates. If the administration loses in the trial courts, it will likely appeal, possibly to the Supreme Court, where a host of disputes raising similar issues involving other besieged agencies are expected to be heard.
The rulings by Judges Oetken and Lamberth provide a template for opposing the arbitrary destruction of congressionally created government agencies and bolstering the rule of law. But outside of the courtroom, the damage has already been done. Out-of-work VOA employees and contractors and looking for new jobs, giving up on careers in journalism. Some contractors are immigrants who have worked in the U.S. on J-1 visas and may lose their legal status here — in which case they may face persecution in their home countries for the journalism they pursued under the aegis of the U.S. government. As a practical matter, Trump has made considerable progress toward ending an eight-decade legacy of internationally focused news reporting designed to promote American interests abroad.
Editor’s note: This piece is part of the Collection: Just Security’s Coverage of the Trump Administration’s Executive Actions
Readers may be especially interested in these essays:
Ambassador Daniel Fried, The US Government’s Self-Harm in Killing Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (Mar. 17, 2025)
Jean Garner, Journalists Who Took Risks for US-Funded Broadcasters Threatened Anew by Trump Shutdown (Mar. 18, 2025)
Mark Pomar, Trump Move to Eliminate VOA, RFE/RL Ignores Lessons of Global Power (Mar. 20, 2025)