Judge gives VOA reprieve
March 9, 2026
A US federal judge has ruled that the appointment of Kari Lake, the head of Voice of America’s (VOA) oversight agency, was invalid, voiding mass layoffs that she had carried out at the federally funded news organisation in 2025.
The decision by Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the US District Court for the District of Columbia is a rejection of US President Donald Trump’s attempts to dismantle VOA. If upheld by higher courts, Lamberth’s ruling would allow more than 1,000 journalists and support staff at the group to return to their jobs. Lake, who had been leading the US Agency for Global Media, VOA’s parent agency, said that she would appeal the decision.
VOA aired in 49 languages and had more than 360 million weekly listeners around the world, providing news services to foreign countries with limited press freedoms, such as China, Russia and Iran.
In his ruling, Judge Lamberth called Trump’s decision to have Lake lead the global media agency without Senate confirmation or appropriate procedures required for an acting head “violence to the statutory and constitutional scheme.”
The judge found that Lake’s appointment violated the law that determines who can serve as an acting head of an agency whose permanent leader would require Senate confirmation. The law, the Vacancies Act, requires that an acting head must be the second senior officer of an agency, be appointed by the president with the Senate’s consent or be a senior officer who had been at the agency before a vacancy arose.
Judge Lamberth found that Lake did not satisfy those conditions.
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