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.’”
