Appeals court allows Trump to block money for federally funded newsrooms, for now

A federal appeals court in Washington ruled Thursday night that, for now, the Trump administration could continue to withhold money from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, federally funded organizations that provide news coverage to countries with limited press freedoms.

In doing so, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit temporarily reversed parts of two lower-court rulings from last month that stopped the administration from cutting off funds to the news outlets.

The appeals court kept in effect parts of one lower court ruling, which required that Trump officials bring back journalists at Voice of America, another federally funded newsroom, from paid leave and resume its news programming.

Unlike Voice of America, which is a government entity, the other three news outlets are private nonprofits that have independent hiring authorities but receive nearly all of their funding from Congress.

The order was an administrative stay, which temporarily blocks a lower-court ruling until appeals court judges decide on whether to overrule the lower court order while they reach a final verdict. It is a partial victory for President Donald Trump, who has accused the newsrooms of spreading anti-American and partisan propaganda, and sought to dismantle the outlets' parent agency in charge of disbursing funds and overseeing their operations.

The ruling will deprive those news organizations of the funding they need for news programming that around 140 million listeners tune into every week across the world.

The news outlets have had to scale back their operations since March, when the Trump administration moved to cut their funding.

They have terminated contracts with freelance journalists, missed payments on office leases and furloughed employees. Lawyers for Radio Free Europe said it would cease operations by June without more funds. Radio Free Asia has put most of its staff on unpaid leave since March.

The funding that the appeals court effectively stopped Thursday could have allowed these newsrooms to continue reporting while fighting for their funding in court.

Before the ruling came down, the Trump administration was scheduled to send about $15 million to those news organizations by Friday, according to court filings. That money included $12 million for Radio Free Europe's April funding, which Trump officials had withheld for weeks.

In March, the Trump administration terminated the grants for the three news outlets after Trump signed an executive order seeking to gut its parent organization, the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

Kari Lake, a close ally of Trump whom he hired as special adviser to the media agency, declared her own workplace "unsalvageable." She also claimed that the media agency and its newsrooms were rampant with "waste, fraud and abuse," without providing evidence.

But the lower court judge, Royce C. Lamberth, ordered Trump officials to resume funding, saying Trump could not unilaterally shut down an organization funded by Congress.

"In this case," the judge wrote in his ruling Tuesday, "It was Congress who ordained that the monies at issue" should go to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in a budget bill that was passed in March. The judge noted that Trump signed that bill himself.

"In short: The current Congress and President Trump enacted a law allocating funds to the plaintiffs," he concluded.

The appeals court decision to pause Lamberth's orders "should not be construed" to mean that its judges had found that the Trump administration had a better chance at winning the case, the three judges wrote in their ruling.

Two of the three appeals court judges overseeing the case, Gregory G. Katsas and Neomi Rao, are appointees of Trump. The third, Cornelia T.L. Pillard, was appointed by President Barack Obama.