A federal judge said at a March 28 hearing in New York he will probably block the Trump administration’s shutdown of Voice of America and order that the international broadcaster’s staffers and contractors be allowed to return to work.
Some 1,300 of the government-funded outlet’s journalists and other employees were placed on administrative leave with full pay on March 15 after President Donald Trump moved to defund its parent agency, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”
The move came as part of the administration’s efforts to downsize the federal bureaucracy. District Judge J. Paul Oetken said it “just feels like the approach was, ‘we’ll take a sledgehammer to the agency and the courts will work it out.’”…