Judge ruled Kari Lake was illegally appointed to Voice of America. Broadcaster is still in turmoil

An appeals court order Tuesday to halt the reinstatement of Voice of America staff has prolonged uncertainty at the global broadcaster left decimated by Kari Lake, the former Phoenix TV news anchor.

VOA had an audience of 360 million before President Donald Trump installed Lake at VOA’s parent agency, which broadcast in 49 languages under a congressional mandate to provide unbiased news around the world.

She quickly shut down most VOA operations and placed nearly all of its workforce on leave. Nearly a year later, on March 7, a federal judge voided those orders, finding that Lake had been appointed illegally. For current and former employees, the ruling was a long-awaited vindication.

“There was never any real interest in learning what the Voice of America was really about, or running the organization,” said Steve Herman, the VOA’s former White House bureau chief. “She seemed to be nothing but an agent of destruction.”

VOA headquarters near the Capitol was just coming back to life under the March 7 order when an appeals court blocked the lower court’s ruling.

Gage Skidmore/CC BY 2.0

Lake drew national attention, and Trump’s, in the months after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters hoping to overturn his defeat. She resigned from the local Fox affiliate in Phoenix and began amplifying his false claims that the election had been stolen.

She made similar claims after her own defeat in the 2022 Arizona governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs and continued to insist she’d been cheated out of the governorship during an unsuccessful Senate bid in 2024 against Democrat Ruben Gallego. Along the way, she endeared herself to Trump and the MAGA base, routinely echoing his attacks on the “fake news.”

A month after his reelection, Trump announced that Lake would run the VOA to ensure “that the American values of Freedom and Liberty are broadcast around the World FAIRLY and ACCURATELY, unlike the lies spread by the Fake News Media.”

But by design, the VOA – launched in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda with accurate and unbiased news – is insulated from presidential meddling. The VOA director is hired and fired by a bipartisan board that advises the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which Trump fired.

Kari Lake with former President Donald Trump at an Arizona rally in October 2022. (Courtesy of KariLake.com) Unable to directly name Lake as VOA director, he instead named her a senior adviser at USAGM.

She took office in early March 2025. On March 14 of that year, Trump issued an executive order directing the VOA be shuttered to the greatest legal extent. The next day, Lake, despite her adviser title, ordered all VOA programs halted and placed more than 1,300 workers on paid administrative leave via email.

“It was low hanging fruit, because it’s government funded and part of the government,” said Herman, now the executive director of the University of Mississippi’s Jordan Center for Journalism Advocacy and Innovation.

A large share of the workforce – foreign journalists the VOA needed for their language skills – faced the prospect of losing their visas and being forced to return to a repressive homeland.

https://twitter.com/KariLake/status/2032160097707725275 “Some of them had literal targets on their back because of their objective reporting about their native country,” Herman said.

In May, a couple dozen full-time employees returned to produce content for audiences in China (Mandarin), Afghanistan (Dari and Pashto) and Iran (Farsi), though at a fraction of the previous scale. That same month, Lake announced a deal with the far-right One America News Network to put its content on USAGM broadcasts.

“Ironically, a service founded to counter Nazi propaganda is now being appropriated as a propaganda machine by the Trump administration,” said Taryn Wilgus Null, senior counsel for the Democracy Defenders Fund, in an email.

When the U.S. attacked Iran in June 2025, the VOA’s Persian service was still off the air. Members of Congress were angry. Seventy-five employees were called back to work.

Lake is currently serving as deputy chief executive of the USAGM. Responding to a request for an interview with Lake, USAGM spokesperson Alex Nicoll said the agency is pursuing its congressional mandate.

“American taxpayers fund USAGM and Voice of America, and those funds by law must support broadcasting that reflects U.S. policy and the interests of the American people,” Nicoll said by email, adding that VOA’s charter “requires authoritative, accurate journalism that is reflective of and clearly presents U.S. policies.”

Why Lake? 

Lake is well known in Arizona after 22 years as an anchor on FOX 10 Phoenix.

In taking an axe to VOA, she was following the Project 2025 playbook. The agenda drafted by Trump advisers called for defunding and dismantling the VOA unless it could be overhauled to stop it from echoing an “anti-U.S. chorus and denigrating the American story.”

Lake took on that mission enthusiastically.

At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in June, she insisted that VOA had “wasted millions, if not billions, of American taxpayer dollars” while generating “anti-American” reporting.

“This agency and its outlets are largely incompetent, corrupt, biased and a threat to America’s national security and standing in the world,” she said.

Among her many critics, Rep. Greg Stanton, D-Phoenix, told Lake that her ongoing election denial meant she had no credibility, certainly not enough to lead a huge international broadcaster.

“Your new role requires you to tell the truth,” he said during the hearing. “For decades, whenever authoritarians and dictators suppressed their people and claimed victory in fraudulent elections, Voice of America countered their lies.”

The day after putting its 1,300 workers on leave, Lake fired 600 contract workers, many of them foreign journalists with the language skills needed to reach VOA’s diverse audience.. The move cost them their J-1 visas.

“If they're not employed by VOA, then they have to go back to their home countries,” said VOA White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara, one of the lead plaintiffs in the first lawsuit challenging Lake’s actions. “And some of them come from repressive regimes where they will be jailed if they return, or even harmed.”

Like other VOA employees who have remained on the payroll, Widakuswara has been barred from performing actual journalistic duties. VOA listeners haven’t heard her reporting in over a year.

Lake critics note that the idled workforce has cost taxpayers tens of millions, with nothing to show for it.

Voice of America headquarters near the U.S. Capitol, shown March 25, 2026. (Photo by Alysa Horton/Cronkite News) Legal disputes

Under federal law related to vacancies at the top of agencies, an acting CEO must be Senate-confirmed to another role, have served as the CEO’s top deputy, or worked as a senior agency official for at least 90 days.

Lake did not check any of those boxes.

USAGM’s last CEO left the month Trump returned to office. Lake joined the agency in March and became deputy CEO in July, after the acting CEO, Victor Morales, delegated his authority to her.

On March 7, 2026, Judge Royce Lamberth, named to the bench by President Ronald Reagan, nullified the firings and all other actions taken by Lake, on grounds that had no lawful authority.

The judge ordered all employees back to work immediately. The government protested that it could only process 70 per week, since each needs a new security badge, and the judge allowed more time.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration appealed the order to reinstate all employees.

Lake called the judge “rotund” and his order “absurd.”

“President Trump tasked me with right-sizing USAGM, a taxpayer-funded global media agency. We've been so effective over the last year that the Deep State has done everything they can to stop us, including launching malicious lawsuits at me and the agency,” she posted on X a few days after the ruling from Lamberth.

A week after employees started to trickle back, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit allowed VOA to stop bringing back furloughed employees.

As workers began to return March 23, four VOA employees and three media advocacy organizations filed a new lawsuit against USAGM, Lake and the current acting CEO, Michael Rigas, accusing them of engaging in illegal censorship and propaganda.

What’s next for Lake? 

After Lamberth’s ruling, Trump nominated senior State Department official Sarah Rogers to serve as USAGM CEO. She awaits Senate confirmation.

Lake said she will appeal that she did have the authority to act as CEO.

“The American people gave President Trump a mandate to cut bloated bureaucracy, eliminate waste, and restore accountability to government," Lake said in a statement to CBS News. "An activist judge is trying to stand in the way of those efforts at USAGM. Judge Lamberth has a pattern of activist rulings – and this case is no different. We strongly disagree with this decision and will appeal.”

When the appeals court stopped the return to work at VOA, Lake taunted The New York Times, telling its reporters they “must be curled up in a ball, sobbing.”

Lake’s controversial tenure at VOA has kept her profile high in the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.

In November, she bought a condo in Davenport, Iowa, near her hometown. That sparked speculation that she might run for GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley’s seat in 2028. At 92, Grassley is the oldest member of Congress.

“She wants to be Donald Trump,” said Arizona political consultant Chuck Coughlin, though “there's only one” Trump.

“There will be a point in time where she's going to have to move on and either choose to be a voice in that MAGA universe, and fulfill that role, or just call it a day and go do something else,” Coughlin said.

This article first appeared on Cronkite News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.