Judge Lamberth Orders USAGM to Produce the Authority Behind Its Current Operations and Brief Whether the VOA Vacatur Is Moot; Agency Answers in Court Filing With Its FY2026 Program Plan

Sequence only, with date kinds. This entry narrows a framing that circulated: the September order did not itself direct USAGM to “account for” a dollar appropriation. It granted a request for the authority behind current operations and set mootness briefing. The appropriation figure appears in the agency’s own later filing.

• September 18, 2026 (order and opinion date): in the consolidated Abramowitz and Widakuswara cases, Judge Lamberth granted plaintiffs’ motion for information related to the earlier vacatur in part. The order grants it “as to the request for the authority that presently justifies the Agency’s operation of the Agency at current operational levels.” The order and opinion are scanned images; the wording was read by OCR and cross-checked against the government’s quotation of it.
• The government’s own filing recites the order: the court ordered it to provide “materials that are guiding or determining the current operation of the agency,” because that information “is indisputably relevant to the Court’s assessment of its subject-matter jurisdiction.”
• October 13, 2026 (filing date): the government answered with a memorandum arguing that vacatur claims are moot (“Plaintiffs’ claim for vacatur of the Statutory Minimum Memorandum is moot”), a declaration from the VOA deputy director, and the agency’s FY 2026 Program Plan. The declaration says: “I do not use or rely on the March 2025 Statutory Minimum Executive Summary Memo to make operational decisions.” It also says USAGM had returned “168 employees” from administrative leave to active duty as of the filing date.
• The Program Plan was submitted to Congress on July 1, 2026 (submission date) and filed in court on the October filing date. It states that it “addresses the entirety of the $652.7 million appropriated for USAGM” under the Act.

Limits: the record read ends with the October 13, 2026 filing; no ruling on mootness was read. The government’s statements are its own advocacy and were not tested by the court in anything read here.