The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a stay granted on Wednesday requiring the Trump administration to continue paying grants to Voice of America (VOA) grantees. The cuts were led by Kari Lake, who was appointed as advisor to the acting CEO of the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees VOA.
Lake posted on X after the ruling, “Judges are trying to take the authority away from the President to run executive branch agencies. This is a gross encroachment on the President’s Article II Powers. The American people voted loud and clear for President Trump and his agenda. We will appeal this ruling as high as possible.” The Trump administration is planning an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court.
Judges are trying take the authority away from the President to run executive branch agencies.
This is a gross encroachment on the President’s Article II Powers.The American people voted loud and clear for President Trump and his agenda.
We will appeal this ruling as high as… https://t.co/AFWhkrjgVK
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) May 28, 2025
Four justices dissented from the full court’s decision. D.C. Circuit Court Judge Gregory Katsas said in his dissent, which Justices Karen Henderson, Neomi Rao, and Justin Walker joined, “The district court lacked jurisdiction to order continued funding for the affiliated networks.”
He first laid out the majority’s reasoning, “The majority denies the government’s stay motions based on its conclusions that (1) the government is unlikely to prevail on its Tucker Act contention and (2) the balance of harms tips for the networks because the government has not yet staked out a merits defense of its decision to terminate the grants.”
Katsas’s decision conflicted with a previous decision by the Supreme Court’s ruling regarding the Department of Government Efficiency cuts this year, Department of Education v. California. He explained in that case, “the Supreme Court concluded that the government was likely to succeed on its Tucker Act argument that the district court lacked jurisdiction.” The nation’s highest court was inclined to agree that “the Tucker Act gave the Court of Federal Claims exclusive jurisdiction over the claims at issue,” so a district court judge would not have the authority to decide the lawsuit.
Additionally, Katsas said, “the Court granted the stay even though the government had not further argued that it would likely succeed on the merits when defending its grant terminations in the Court of Federal Claims.”
Consequently, Katsas said the Trump administration didn’t need to address the merits in this case either. In Department of Education v. California, the plaintiffs sued over the Trump administration’s termination of various education-related grants.
The cuts to VOA and USAGM began on March 14 with an executive order. Lake drastically reduced staff at the agencies and terminated their agreements with NGOs, including Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL). RFE/RL filed a lawsuit, and Royce Charles Lamberth, a senior judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, issued an injunction restoring the contracts and returning employees to work.
After the D.C. Circuit panel reversed Lamberth’s injunction, Lake resumed cutting employees. No articles have been posted on VOA’s website or X account since the executive order was issued in mid-March.
Trump has referred to VOA as “The Voice of Radical America.” Daniel Robinson, a journalist who worked for the VOA and USAGM for 34 years, exposed the bias in recent op-eds. “I have monitored the agency’s bureaucracy along with many of its reporters and concluded that it has essentially become a hubris-filled rogue operation often reflecting a leftist bias aligned with partisan national media,” he said in a November op-ed for The Washington Times.
VOA “throws Associated Press or Reuters stories online” instead of doing its own work, Robinson said in another op-ed. He stated that VOA frequently piggybacks on the reporting of those two mainstream media organizations and cannot keep up with its equivalent, the BBC, despite the BBC being from a much smaller country.
Lake previously described the parent agency, USAGM, as “giant rot.” She said in March when canceling an expensive new lease, “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.”
In a March 2025 video posted on X, she said the lease was a “colossal waste of money”. She described the building as a “shiny, brand-new beautiful skyscraper” with “fancy conference rooms,” “four bridges to nowhere,” “massive waterfalls,” and “Italian marble finishes,” costing taxpayers “nearly a quarter of a billion dollars.”
MUST SEE: America, how do you feel about leasing a fancy Washington DC high-rise for a quarter of $1 billion?
That’s exactly what the last administration did at the US Agency for Global Media.@KariLake exposes waste & corruption, and will work to root it out.
WATCH & SHARE!… pic.twitter.com/8Zs5XhKV3I
— Kari Lake (@KariLake) March 14, 2025
VOA and RFE/RL have cost taxpayers $1 billion annually. Lake recently announced a partnership with the patriotic One America News Network to provide free content.
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Rachel Alexander is a reporter at The Arizona Sun Times and The Star News Network. Follow Rachel on Twitter / X. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Kari Lake” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0. Background Photo “VOA Building” by PersianDutchNetwork. CC BY-SA 4.0.
