Judge orders Trump administration to explain why order to restore Voice of America wasn't followed

Key Points

• A federal judge, Royce Lamberth, has ordered the Trump administration to clarify why it has not restored the operations of Voice of America (VOA) and explain its actions regarding the $260 million allocated for the outlet.
• The judge highlighted that VOA has been largely inactive since March and criticized the administration for providing "cagey answers" and avoiding previous court inquiries.
• Lamberth expressed concerns about potential government waste, stating that the defendants may be "trying to run out the clock" on the fiscal year without utilizing the funds as intended by Congress.
• 85% of VOA and its supervisory body, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, have reportedly been laid off under the Trump administration's restructuring efforts.

A federal judge on Wednesday essentially accused the Trump administration of ignoring his orders to restore Voice of America's operations and explain clearly what it is doing with the government-run operation that provides news to other countries.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth of the District of Columbia gave the administration until Aug. 13 to explain how it will get VOA working again. The outlet that dates back to World War II has been largely dark since March.

Lamberth said the administration needs to show what it is doing with the $260 million Congress appropriated for VOA's operations this year.

Kari Lake, the adviser appointed by Trump to run the government news agencies, said in June that 85% of employees at VOA and its overseers at the U.S. Agency for Global Media had lost their jobs. She called it a “long overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy.”

Lamberth said there's a process for eliminating funding that had previously been appropriated — Congress must vote on it, as it recently did for NPR and PBS funding. But that hasn't happened here, he said.

He scolded the administration for providing “cagey answers” and omitting key information when asked for it in previous court orders.

“Without more explanation, the court is left to conclude that the defendants are simply trying to run out the clock on the fiscal year, without putting the money Congress appropriated toward the purposes Congress intended,” Lamberth wrote. “The legal term for that is ‘waste.’”

There was no immediate comment from the White House.

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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social.