A US court granted Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's (RFE/RL) request for a preliminary injunction in its lawsuit against the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) over its failure to pay RFE/RL its congressionally appropriated funds.
Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia said in his ruling handed down on July 18 that USAGM must disburse RFE/RL’s remaining congressionally appropriated funds for fiscal year 2025, concluding that the agency’s conditioning of funds on the imposition of onerous new grant terms and failure to engage in good-faith negotiations with RFE/RL violate the law.
“As far as this Court is aware, it is unprecedented for an agency to demand that entirely new terms govern its decades-old working relationship with a grantee entity and then stop responding, particularly when the agency is statutorily obligated to grant yearly congressional appropriations to that specific entity by name,” he wrote.
SEE ALSO: RFE/RL Audiences Voice Support For Its Journalism -- And Fears For Its FutureThe threat to the broadcaster’s funding has sparked a wave of global support from media watchdogs, analysts, and democracy advocates, as well as the audiences in the 27 languages and 23 countries in which RFE/RL broadcasts.
Lamberth said in his ruling that “USAGM’s flagrant disregard for its funding responsibilities” has caused RFE/RL to suffer “mass furloughs, cancelation of programming, and inevitable damage to the global influence that RFE/RL has built over decades.”
Steve Capus, RFE/RL’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement that the ruling is “the culmination of relentless legal efforts to compel USAGM to release the funding necessary to carry out RFE/RL’s vital mission.”
“This victory provides our journalists with the momentum necessary to continue reaching the nearly 47 million people each week who rely on our journalism for the facts and to counter malicious propaganda from authoritarian governments,” he said.
“Now more than ever, we cannot cede the information space to tyrants,” Capus added, noting that with the ruling, “RFE/RL can continue to advance U.S. national security interests.”
The USAGM is an independent US government agency that oversees the broadcasting of news and information in more than 60 languages to over 400 million people each week.
The total budget request for the USAGM for fiscal year 2025 was $950 million to fund all of its operations and capital investments.
This includes media outlets such as RFE/RL, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (Radio Marti), Middle East Broadcasting Networks (MBN), and the Open Technology Fund.
The 2025 budget request for RFE/RL itself was about $153 million, according to USAGM documents.