President Trump notched a big legal victory in his effort to streamline Voice of America (VOA), the state-funded international broadcaster that has long been coopted by leftists.
A federal appeals court in Washington D.C. found that a district court judge overstepped when he ordered Trump to reinstate 1,000 Voice of America employees.
Kari Lake, who runs VOA's parent agency US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), praised the appeals court's ruling as a check against an activist judiciary that has blocked Trump from exercising his constitutional powers.
"BIG WIN in our legal cases at USAGM & Voice of America. Huge victory for President Trump and Article II. Turns out the District Court judge will not be able to manage the agency as he seemed to want to," she wrote on X.
Trump's effort to reform VOA is part of a broader push to rein in publicly funded news organizations, like NPR and PBS, that are nominally neutral put often put a left-wing spin on the news of the day.
"Voice of America has been out of step with America for years. It serves as the Voice for Radical America and has pushed divisive propaganda for years now," a senior White House official told Fox News Digital in March.
On April 22, Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, blocked Trump's March executive order directing USAGM to downsize to the furthest extent possible under law.
The judge ordered Trump to reinstate 1,000 VOA employees who were put on leave and restore grant funding to two private non-profits that USAGM oversees, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks.
In a sharp reversal, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit Court overruled Lamberth on Saturday, finding he lacked jurisdiction to dictate how Trump manages international broadcasting.
Two Trump appointees, Neomi Rao and Gregory Katsas, rebuked the lower court for its troubling "intrusion" into foreign affairs, noting the president's special prerogative in that realm.
"This intrusion is particularly harmful because it implicates the Executive Branch’s foreign-affairs authority," the court wrote.
"By depriving the Executive Branch of control over the individuals involved in its international broadcasting, the injunction threatens its prerogative to 'speak with one voice' on behalf of the United States in foreign affairs."
Cornelia Pillard, an Obama appointee, dissented, warning that the court's ruling "all but guarantees that the networks will no longer exist in any meaningful form by the time this case is fully adjudicated."
