Congress Put $643 Million Back Into Voice of America. 1,042 of Its Employees Are Still on Leave.

On March 14, 2025, Voice of America was broadcasting in 49 languages to roughly 362 million people a week, per sworn testimony cited in the federal court record.▸ By the next afternoon, its parent agency had ordered the newsroom dark. A year of litigation later, Congress has put the money back. The people are a separate problem, and it hasn't been solved.

On March 14, 2025, the White House ordered seven federal agencies, including the U.S. Agency for Global Media, to shrink to the "minimum presence and function required by law."▸ USAGM's leadership — led by senior adviser Kari Lake, who by her own testimony was exercising "95 percent" of the agency CEO's authority — began implementing it within a day, before anyone had determined what that legal minimum actually was.

The result, per the district court's memorandum opinion in Abramowitz v. Lake: 1,042 of USAGM's 1,147 full-time employees were placed on paid administrative leave the next day.▸ Contracts for 598 personal service contractors — including VOA journalists reporting from abroad — were terminated effective March 31. The only written plan for what would survive, a three-page "Statutory Minimum Memorandum" dated March 18, identified just 68 employee or contractor positions to keep; the document "contains no findings, analysis, or consideration of any relevant factors" beyond an assertion that VOA's programming was "duplicative" of private broadcasters, the court found.

The judge, Royce Lamberth, ruled the shutdown "arbitrary and capricious" and unlawfully withheld broadcasting Congress requires by statute.▸ He ordered the defendants to "take all necessary steps to return USAGM employees and contractors to their status prior to" the executive order — reinstatement by March 23, 2026. Nine days later, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit stayed that requirement pending the government's appeal. The stay remains in effect: the workers Judge Lamberth ordered back to their desks are, under the appellate order, not required to be there.

While the reinstatement fight was working through the courts, a separate process was working through Congress.▸ USAGM's own FY2026 budget request asked for $153 million — not to run the agency, but to wind it down: severance, deferred resignations, and "decommissioning of overseas transmission stations." Lawmakers rejected that framing. The enacted FY2026 appropriation, per the House Appropriations Committee's summary of the Consolidated Appropriations Act signed February 3, 2026, funds USAGM at $643 million — $490 million above the shutdown-budget request, though still 26% below the $866.9 million the agency operated on in FY2024 and FY2025.

So the ledger, a year in: Congress restored four times the money the administration asked for to shut USAGM down.▸ The court found the shutdown itself unlawful. And the 1,042 people whose jobs that shutdown froze are, per the stayed order, still drawing full government salaries for work they are not permitted to do — a fact the court itself noted had already gone on, at the time of its ruling, for "just over a year."

This piece covers USAGM/Voice of America federal appropriations and the docketed record in Abramowitz v. Lake as of July 2026; the underlying appeal was still pending at the D.C. Circuit at publication.