The Trump administration is spending $1.6 million a week to keep hundreds of Voice of America journalists on paid leave, the Washington Post reported on October 2 — paying full salaries and benefits to employees who have done no work for more than 18 months.
According to the Post's Scott Nover, several hundred VOA employees have been on paid administrative leave since the agency sidelined them in March 2025. The weekly tab of about $1.6 million works out to more than $80 million a year — for zero output. The leave notices told staff they would "continue to receive pay and benefits until otherwise notified," while ordering them to stay out of agency facilities and turn in their phones and computers.
The saga began when President Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 directing that the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), VOA's parent agency, be reduced "to the minimum presence and function required by law." Within days, nearly all of VOA's roughly 1,300 employees were placed on paid leave. "For the first time in 83 years, the storied Voice of America is being silenced," VOA director Michael Abramowitz said at the time.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth has repeatedly ruled the administration's dismantling of VOA "arbitrary and capricious," ordering 1,042 employees back to work and finding that Trump ally Kari Lake's appointment to run the agency violated the Constitution's Appointments Clause, voiding her mass-layoff decisions. But the cuts have not stopped: on Friday, October 2, another 639 VOA and USAGM employees received layoff notices. Lake said about 1,400 people — 85 percent of the workforce — have left since March, calling it a "long-overdue effort to dismantle a bloated, unaccountable bureaucracy."
The federal government shutdown that began October 1 forced VOA's remaining broadcasts off the air, with a notice on its website blaming the lapse in funding. The irony: just two days earlier, a judge had ordered the agency to restore VOA programming. The Persian service tells the story in miniature — several staffers were called off leave last week to cover Israel's attack on Iran, only to have their badges confiscated on Friday while out for a cigarette break, barred from re-entering the building.
Founded in 1942 during World War II, VOA once broadcast in 49 languages to an estimated 360 million people a week. Today only four languages — Persian, Mandarin, Dari and Pashto — are still on the air. Three VOA employees suing the administration said in a joint statement: "It spells the death of 83 years of independent journalism." VOA chief national correspondent Steve Herman called the layoffs a "historic act of self-sabotage," while the union president said Friday's terminations were illegal.
What comes next turns on the courts: Lamberth has demanded a written update on whether the government is complying with his order to preserve VOA. Herman is not optimistic — even a future administration and a newly funded Congress may not save it: "I believe that the destruction is permanent."