Name: US federal judge blocks Trump's shut down of international broadcaster Voice of America | DW News
Uploaded: 2026-03-19T23:02:38.000Z
Duration: 9 min 40 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

A federal judge in the US has blocked the Trump administration's attempt to shut down international broadcaster Voice of America and to lay off more than a thousand of its staff members.

Judge Royce Lambert has given the US Agency of Global Media, which oversees voa, one week to restore operations and bring employees back to work.

Adverbs of manner

VOA has been operating with a skeleton staff since last year, when Trump, a longtime critic of the publicly funded broadcaster, issued an executive order to shut it down.

VOA was founded in 1942 to counter Nazi propaganda and has long been viewed as promoting US Values international.

He's a DW correspondent based in our Washington, D.C. bureau.

I'm sure you've seen his reporting from all across the U.S.

but before Misha came to DW, he was the White House correspondent for Voice of America until President Trump started shutting down voa.

We asked you to come on the show tonight because there's been a big legal change of heart, if you will.

A judge last night basically undoing the undoing of voa.

Your thoughts on this, this second life, maybe for voa?

Well, Brent, I definitely had spent six beautiful years with VOA and did my prominent reporting over there.

When President Trump was hosting President Zelensky of Ukraine in the Oval Office and essentially yielded him something that we had never seen before and the January six insurrection, I was among a few reporters who got into the Capitol with the, with the crowd.

And I spoke to my former colleagues this morning and they are saying it's a huge win for them, this ruling.

has ordered void to go back on air and bring back employees the government tried to cut last year.

And the deadline here is basically Monday, March 23rd.

And the decision covers more than 1,000 full time staff employees who were placed on administrative leave.

So essentially they were not officially fired here.

They were put on administrative leave and they were not allowed to do their jobs, even though they were getting paid for more than a year.

And it's still unclear how this will work in reality.

After VOA stopped broadcasting, the new leadership decided to essentially sell off the equipment.

Equipment, cut off all the key systems in the building and keep employees out of this very building.

And the building itself was put up for sale and it's just blocks away from, from the Congress iconic view, iconic neighborhood.

And it's, it is like trying to start a cold engine overnight.

It's nearly impossible to bring it back in a heartbeat.

I want to talk about the future of VOA in just a moment, but

maybe if you could tell our viewers a little bit about your story.

How did you find out that your job, voa, was on the chopping block?

Did you have face to face conversations with Trump ally Carrie Lake?

She basically served as the head of VOA's oversight agency.

Well, Brent, I was actually fired twice, believe it or not.

I worked as a contractor with the Voice of America, and

there were a lot of administrative mistakes in how the termination paperwork was served to us.

And a few days before the new administration returned to power, it was the day when President Biden, former President Biden, was delivering his final speech.

I did have a chance to briefly speak with Carrie Lake.

It wasn't a long or particularly detailed conversation, but

my impression, to be honest, was that she wasn't openly talking about shutting down or dismantling VOA altogether.

Instead, she seemed very focused on reshaping the organization and essentially putting her own stamp on it.

And there was also a lot of speculation internally about her plans.

Some people believe that she might even get her own show.

And she has a strong background in broadcasting and clearly feels comfortable on camera.

She does live hits almost daily for conservative media here in the United States.

So at that point, the expectation among many of us wasn't that VOA was going to be silent or silenced.

We thought that it would go undergo significant changes in direction and leadership.

And looking back, though, the way everything unfolded was far more chaotic than anyone expected, anticipated, especially for contractors like myself, because we ended in a kind of, like, gray zone, without clear protections or communication.

And, you know, your former colleagues at VOA, who will be going back into the office basically next week, I mean, that they say that's a victory, but

I mean, this is not going to be a complete undoing of what the Trump administration has already done to voa.

But not all of them will be coming back to the office.

And fellow journalist, a good friend of mine, she had to get back to Ukraine, for instance, where the war is still going on and many people had to go back to their own countries with wars and imminent threats.

And if we're talking about reset, no, it's not going to be a full reset immediately.

Even with the court decisions involving the Voice of America.

What's been done over the past year can't simply be undone over overnight.

And the ruling may force the government to restore broadcasting and bring back full time staff again.

Again, equipment has been sold off, teams broken apart, and

many experienced people, especially contractors, are no longer there.

In some cases, entire parts of the operation would need to be rebuilt from scratch.

So what we're likely to see here is not a return to what we used to be, but, but

And even under the best case scenario here, it would take very, a little bit, a little bit of time, a little bit of resources and political will to rebuild something close to what it was once.

The Persian language service has been rebooted somewhat with the war now in Iran.

But is it able to do what it otherwise would have been able to do, which is reaching the people of Iran who at the moment are living in an Internet information blackout?

Iran's connectivity is being throttled to single digit, single digit percentages here and pushed toward a whitelist model.

And it does make access to outside news extremely, extremely constrained.

And that's what View is actually good at, really good at.

It's a short wave satellite, VPN friendly and social media distribution.

They could have one of, they could have one of few ways Iranians could get censored coverage.

And some argue that that restored Persian service operation is not enough and that the world needs voa, especially in Iran these days as never before.

I know that VOA represents US soft power that has not enjoyed favor in the Trump administration.

What do you think the fate of VOA means for other international broadcasters such as dw?

I mean, can the rest of the democratic world, in your opinion and its media outlets, fill the void of voa?

Well, it's definitely a cautionary tale for international broadcasters like us.

VOA has long been a key instrument of US soft power, showing the world American values, American culture and American perspectives.

And under the Trump administration that role wasn't prioritized as we see.

And the disruptions over the past year made that vulnerability very, very clear.

For other international broadcasters like Deutsche Welle, it sends a signal that even well established state backed media or public backed media can be undermined by political shifts at home.

And the rest of democratic world can partially fill the void, especially in areas where VOA has been weakened.

But a diminished view leaves a gap in the United States representation and influence.

It's about shaping the global narrative here and maintaining trust with audiences that rely on independent reporting.

And literally a month ago, I bumped into some people in Istanbul who recognized me, thanked us for our reporting here, but

They were like, well, we had to switch to DW at this point.

But they really hope that it would bounce back.

And it's yet to be seen if it's going to turn into reality.