US judge temporarily halts mass layoff of Voice of America employees

According to a court ruling issued Monday, a US federal judge temporarily halted President Donald Trump’s administration’s plan to fire around 500 Voice of America employees.

Despite legal challenges and claims that US enemies will gain, Kari Lake, a senior advisor to the US Agency for Global Media, has led Trump’s drive to destroy government-funded media.

Following a Trump directive that froze VOA for the first time since its founding in 1942, hundreds of its employees got warnings of termination in June.

The terminations were scheduled to go into effect on September 30, but US District Judge Royce Lamberth decided against Lake and stopped them.

“The Reduction in Force announced by Defendant Lake on or about August 29, 2025, is SUSPENDED and may NOT be implemented… until this Court has ruled on the plaintiffs’ Motion,” Lamberth wrote, referring to further legal proceedings set for next month.

The court issued a preliminary injunction in April after concluding Lake’s actions were “arbitrary and capricious and not in accordance with law,” the judge said in the 19-page legal order.

Monday’s ruling was meant to facilitate the injunction and restore VOA’s programming so that the USAGM fulfills its statutory mandate, he added.

Lake has said that the June termination notices were a “long-overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy.”

The judge found that Lake and other defendants resisted the court’s effort to obtain information on whether they had made a plan to comply with the April injunction.

“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… statutory obligations,” the judge wrote.

Established as a tool of American soft power during World War II, USAGM is an autonomous organization entrusted with advancing democracy and combating misinformation abroad through organizations such as the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, and VOA.

The so-called editorial firewall at VOA, which forbids the government from interfering in its coverage and which the president deems to be overly critical of his administration, has been mocked by Trump, who regularly targets media outlets.