A federal judge agreed Monday to temporarily suspend the Trump administration's plan to eliminate hundreds of jobs at the agency that oversees Voice of America, the government-funded broadcaster founded to counter Nazi propaganda during World War II. US District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington, DC, ruled that the US Agency for Global Media cannot implement a reduction in force eliminating 532 jobs for full-time government employees on Tuesday, the AP reports. Those employees represent the vast majority of its remaining staff. Kari Lake, the agency's acting CEO, announced in late August that the job cuts would take effect Tuesday. But the judge's ruling preserves the status quo at the agency until he rules on a plaintiffs' underlying motion to block the reduction in force.
Lamberth previously ruled that President Trump's Republican administration must restore VOA programming to levels commensurate with its statutory mandate to "serve as a consistently reliable and authoritative source of news." He also blocked Lake from removing Michael Abramowitz as VOA's director. Lamberth accused the administration of showing "concerning disrespect" toward the court in response to his earlier orders to produce information about its plans for Voice of America. He noted that the agency initiated the job cuts only hours after a hearing last month in which government lawyers said a reduction in force, or RIF, was merely a possibility.
"The defendants' obfuscation of this Court's request for information regarding whether their RIF plans comported with the preliminary injunction has wasted precious judicial time and resources and readily support contempt proceedings," Lamberth wrote. But he said he wouldn't initiate contempt proceedings on his own because the plaintiffs haven't sought it yet. "However, (the court's) deference to the plaintiffs with respect to further proceedings should not be mistaken for lenience toward the defendants' egregious erstwhile conduct," he added.
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