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Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s Voice of America Shutdown
The plaintiffs claim that appointee Kari Lake "usurped Congressional power and acted arbitrarily” in trying to dismantle the broadcast network The post Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s Voice of America Shutdown appeared first on TheWrap.
A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from shutting down the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the parent company of Voice of America, on Friday.
Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order to eliminate the agency, which was established in 1999. VOA, however, dates back to 1942.
A lawsuit filed by “government employees, individual journalists, unions, and nonprofits advocating for independent journalism,” accuse Lake, who is Senior Advisor to the Acting CEO of the USAGM, of “violat[ing] Plaintiffs’ First Amendment rights. Victor Morales, a Senior Analyst who has reported on U.S. and international affairs for more than two decades, is also named in the lawsuit.
“The dismantling of USAGM would clearly cause employees, contractors, and grantees irreparable harm,” the judge wrote. “And Plaintiffs have offered sufficient evidence that Defendants are doing just that.”
Plaintiffs argue that Lake’s actions are “arbitrary and capricious” because they
occurred “mere hours after the President’s executive order and did not give a justification for shutting the agency down.”
The USAGM website states that the agency’s mission “is to inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.”
Voice of America is just one of the cultural institutions targeted by Trump since he took office in January. He also took over as head of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC after firing the entire board of trustees.
On Thursday, he also signed an executive order to “remove improper ideology” from The Smithsonian Institution, because the museum complex supposedly promotes “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive.”
The post Federal Judge Blocks Trump’s Voice of America Shutdown appeared first on TheWrap.
