A White House plot to axe international broadcasters Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has been foiled after presidential advisor Kari Lake was forced to rescind a letter canceling the network’s grants.
It comes just a day after a judge temporarily halted an attempt by the Trump administration to shut down the station, claiming it would “violate the Constitution and federal laws.”
“We’re confident the law is on our side as the US Constitution grants Congress the exclusive power of the purse,” RFE CEO Stephen Capus said in a statement after Wednesday’s hearing. “It is unlawful to deny us the funds that Congress has already appropriated to RFE/RL for the rest of this fiscal year.”
Although no official ruling was made, the temporary pause was enough to make the White House back off, and in a letter written by Lake on behalf of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, who spearheaded the charge to cancel the broadcaster, acknowledged that attempts to take them off the air had been “rescinded” and that the network would continue to receive federal funding for the foreseeable future.
“This rescission is without prejudice to USAGM’s authority to terminate the grant at a later date if USAGM were to determine that such a termination was appropriate under the applicable law,” she added.
“Plaintiff has secured the primary relief—withdrawing the termination of its grant agreement—that it requested in the complaint,” Lake wrote in a notice to the court.
“Now that Plaintiff has received the relief, Defendants’ position is that this matter is now moot. At a minimum, in light of the reinstatement of Plaintiff’s grant, there is certainly no ongoing ‘certain and great’ irreparable harm that could justify injunctive relief.”
The lawsuit, filed by RFE, came after an executive order by Trump to gut the USAGM, which saw over 1,300 journalists at Voice of America placed on indefinite administrative leave. In a statement announcing the move, the White House decried the network as the “Voice of Radical America” and claimed “taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.”
But the network, which has long been seen as a tool of American soft power, condemned the move as a “betrayal of the ideals” which underpinned the organization and said the decision will be “celebrated” by enemies of the U.S.
Trump’s efforts to shut down both Radio Free Europe and Voice of America have been met with accusations the president is once again attempting to curry favor with authoritarian regimes, several of which he has openly expressed sympathy for.
In a recent op-ed in The Hill, RFE’s former director of research Ronald Linden said: “Autocrats know now, as they did in 1989, that they must control the information environment. America should challenge those efforts with the powerful voices we have and, at the very least, not put out of business one of our most valuable instruments of global influence.”
