A federal appeals court ruled unanimously on Tuesday, November 10, that Trump administration officials broke the law when they tried to fire Voice of America director Michael Abramowitz — the latest court defeat for the administration's push to dismantle the U.S. government's international broadcaster. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a permanent injunction that bars Abramowitz's removal unless an independent board approves it.
Source: QNC News, Nov 11, 2026
The case is Abramowitz v. Lake, No. 25-5314. Judge Cornelia Pillard wrote for the panel, joined by Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Florence Pan. "The leaders of the Agency for Global Media ignored that statute when they attempted unilaterally to fire Michael Abramowitz, the head of Voice of America," Pillard wrote, in the words quoted from the opinion in court reporting.
Source: WorkersRights.news — court reporting on Abramowitz v. Lake, Nov 10, 2026
The law at the centre of the case
After a wave of firings at the agency in 2020, Congress gave an independent body — the International Broadcasting Advisory Board — the final say over hiring and firing the heads of U.S.-funded networks such as Voice of America. Under the statute, 22 U.S.C. § 6205(e), the VOA director may be appointed or removed only with the approval of a majority of that board. The board is not a formality in the court's reading: it is, in effect, the head of the agency for removal purposes, and the director is an inferior officer answerable to it.
That structure collided with the administration's first months back in office. According to the opinion reporting, President Donald Trump dismissed six of the board's seven members in early 2025, leaving only Secretary of State Marco Rubio — and no quorum able to approve any firing. A March 2025 executive order then directed the U.S. Agency for Global Media to shrink to its legally required minimum, and agency leaders including Kari Lake, then a senior adviser to the acting chief executive, placed Abramowitz and about 1,300 other VOA employees on indefinite administrative leave.
A reassignment refused, then a firing
Lake moved to remove Abramowitz in August 2025 after he declined a reassignment to a lower-level post in Greenville, North Carolina. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth blocked the removal that month — his permanent injunction of August 28, 2025 is the order the appeals court has now affirmed — concluding that the firing authority belonged to the board, not to Lake. Lamberth had separately ruled earlier in 2025 on Lake's own authority while she oversaw the agency's wind-down, in related litigation over the broadcaster.
Notably, the government did not seriously dispute that the removal violated the statute. Its argument was constitutional: that the board-approval requirement infringed the president's removal power under Article II. The panel rejected that challenge, holding the safeguard constitutional — because board members themselves are removable at will by the president, the court reasoned, presidential control runs indirectly but sufficiently through the board. The panel did not decide whether the president could directly remove an inferior officer himself under the recent Trump v. Slaughter ruling, and it held that Abramowitz did not have to exhaust the Civil Service Reform Act's administrative process before going to court.
It keeps one man legally in his job: Abramowitz cannot be removed without board approval. It does not, by itself, restart Voice of America, restore the roughly 1,300 employees placed on leave, or settle the wider legal fight over the broadcaster's future — the decision addresses only the director's removal.
A broadcaster built for a world war, fought over in peacetime
Voice of America was created during the Second World War to push back against Nazi messaging, and grew into the flagship of U.S. international broadcasting, beaming news in dozens of languages to audiences — including large South Asian and Punjabi-speaking audiences abroad and in the diaspora — who in many countries have few independent alternatives. That reach is why control of the broadcaster has become a courtroom fight: the administration sought to shrink it to a statutory minimum, while Congress's own statute put a board between the White House and the network heads precisely to slow down exactly this kind of removal.
For the court's majority, that design was the point. The opinion treats the board-approval rule as a durable legislative safeguard, not a routine workplace rule — and because the administration emptied the board before trying to fire the director, there was no lawful route around it. Abramowitz, meanwhile, remains on administrative leave even after winning: the injunction blocks his removal, but the reporting makes clear his day-to-day status at the agency is a separate, still-contested question.
What happens next
The administration can ask the full D.C. Circuit to rehear the case or take it to the Supreme Court; no such filing had been reported by Wednesday. The board itself remains the immediate obstacle: with six of seven seats empty, there is no quorum to approve a removal, so any lawful firing would first require the president to nominate — and the Senate to engage with — new board members. Parallel litigation over the agency's dismantling, its funding and its employees' status continues in the lower courts.