NEW YORK CITY, New York: A week after U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth questioned the appointment of Kari Lake to lead the government-run Voice of America, he ordered the Trump administration on March 16 to restore the radio broadcaster and multimedia agency's operations.
VOA had effectively been shut down a year ago, putting hundreds of employees out of work.
Judge Lamberth gave the U.S. Agency for Global Media one week to develop a plan to restore Voice of America to the air. It has been operating with a skeleton staff since President Donald Trump issued an executive order to shut it down.
On March 8, Lamberth had said Kari Lake, who was Trump's choice to lead the agency, did not have the legal authority to do what she had done at Voice of America. On March 17, Lamberth ruled on her action of firing 1,042 of VOA's 1,147 employees.
There was no immediate response to the decision from the agency that oversees Voice of America. Kari Lake had earlier criticized the March 7 ruling by Judge Lamberth and said it would be appealed.
Since then, Donald Trump has nominated Sarah Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, to lead the U.S. Agency for Global Media, but the appointment still needs Senate approval, unlike Lake's, which did not go through that process.
Patsy Widakuswara, the White House bureau chief at Voice of America and one of the people who filed the lawsuit to restore it, said she was very thankful for the decision. She added that they were ready to begin repairing the harm caused by Lake to the agency and its staff, return to their original mission set by Congress, and rebuild trust with their global audience, which they had been unable to serve over the past year.
She also said that restoring VOA's work and reputation would take time and be challenging. She expressed hope that the American public would continue to support its goal of producing journalism rather than propaganda.
Voice of America has been broadcasting news to countries around the world since its creation during World War II, often reaching places without a free press. Before Trump's executive order, it operated in 49 languages and reached an audience of about 362 million people.
