Judge Lamberth Will Shank Anyone Who Touches The VOA

Fascism makes strange bedfellows. Especially when the fellows who refuse to get in bed with the fascists wind up bunking together. And so we find ourselves grateful to Judge Royce Lamberth for saving Voice of America from the depredations of the DOGE bros.

First Judge Harvie Wilkinson, then Lamberth! Whodathunkit?

On March 14, President Trump issued an executive order “Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy,” targeting several congressionally-created and -funded agencies, including the United States Agency for Global Media, the parent agency for VOA, Cuba Broadcasting, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting Networks and the Open Technology Fund. Since World War II, the US government has operated the media outlets to export American values. The stations were a crucial propaganda tool during the Cold War and continue to project American soft power across the globe.

Naturally Trump wants to cut them, along with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in the Smithsonian Institution, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund, and the Minority Business Development Agency. And so he ordered that “the non-statutory components and functions … shall be eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law, and such entities shall reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum presence and function required by law.”

It’s the same death sentence he’s decreed for so many federal agencies already. And courts have largely let him do it. Judge Richard Leon declared himself powerless to stop DOGE shutting down the US African Development Foundation. And Judge Beryl Howell did not step in to save the US Institute for Peace, even allowing DOGE to steal the agency’s $500 million building. Only Judge Loren Alikhan blocked the government from burning down the Inter-American Foundation entirely, ordering reinstatement of its director now rather than at the conclusion of litigation because “Reinstatement matters little if the officer of a government organization returns to a pile of rubble.”

But now Judge Lamberth, with an assist from Judge Paul Oetken in the Southern District of New York, has stepped up to the plate with the apparently novel conclusion that firing all but two or three employees and cutting 99.9 percent of programming is not “consistent with applicable law.”

USAGM filed suit first in New York, noting that, within days of the executive order, upwards of 75 percent of the staff had been fired and virtually every contract was terminated.

The agency, which is being led by Arizona’s perennial losing Republican candidate Kari Lake, announced on its website:

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. While there are bright spots within the agency with personnel who are talented and dedicated public servants, this is the exception rather than the rule.

And indeed, USAGM ceased broadcasting across multiple platforms.

On March 28, Judge Oetken granted a TRO banning the further dismantling of USAGM, finding that it “appears to violate, at minimum, the Take Care Clause and separation of powers principles of the United States Constitution,” as well as the Administrative Procedure Act. Then a week later he transferred the case to DC, to be joined with the pending VOA suit before Judge Lamberth.

Judge Lamberth, a Reagan-appointee who has been on the bench since the earth cooled, can charitably be called an iconoclast. (The uncharitable term is kook.) He authorized wiretaps of reporters, allowed those weirdos at Judicial Watch to depose Hillary Clinton and her top aides, and blocked tort claims against the government by Gitmo detainees, but by God he is not going to let VOA go down on his watch.

He rubbished the notion that the government carefully reduced USAGM to it’s statutory minimum, noting that the defendants shut down the entire 80-year-old radio network within a week of Trump’s executive order and produced zero documentation of any deliberation or planning.

“They took immediate and drastic action to slash USAGM, without considering its statutorily or constitutionally required functions as required by the plain language of the EO, and without regard to the harm inflicted on employees, contractors, journalists, and media consumers around the world,” he raged. “It is hard to fathom a more straightforward display of arbitrary and capricious actions than the Defendants’ actions here.”

And he scoffed at the claim that foreign reporters here on J-1 visas were not irreparably harmed because, as the government put it, they would merely be forced them to leave the country “earlier than scheduled.”

“The immediate termination of John Does 3 and 4’s contracts and visas is ‘not merely speeding up the inevitable’ because the hastiness of the defendants’ actions eliminates the notice that Does 3 and 4 would otherwise have ‘to find a new job to sponsor a subsequent visa, or to apply for another kind of visa to stay in the country,'” he raged incredulously. “The defendants’ actions virtually ensure that Does 3 and 4 will be subject to deportation immediately.”

The judge declined the Trump administration’s suggestion that he impose a bond on the defendants — a request the DOJ was obliged to make as a result of yet another fakakta EO.

“That is squarely the case here, where the defendants are already constitutionally required to distribute funds in accordance with the yearly appropriations bill, so a bond would merely impose a financial barrier to litigation for plaintiffs seeking to vindicate their statutory and constitutional rights,” he snorted.

Instead he ordered the government to rehire everyone who worked there before the March 14 EO and submit monthly status reports to the court demonstrating that VOA got every penny Congress allocated to it.

See? It can be done! All it takes is one pissed-off octogenarian who is all out of fucks to give.

Widakusawa v. Lake [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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