A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has ordered the Trump administration to “take all necessary steps” to bring employees of Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, and Middle East Broadcasting Networks back to work and to resume their broadcasts.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who is overseeing a series of lawsuits from employees and contractors impacted by the administration’s efforts to shutter the taxpayer-funded, international broadcasters, ruled that their work was mandated by Congress and cannot be unilaterally terminated or defunded by the executive branch, according to Reuters.

The judge did not agree with arguments from the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the umbrella organization that includes the broadcasters, that it had not made a “final decision” on the future of their work and that the lawsuits should be considered merely “employment disputes,” Reuters reported.

“It strains credulity to conclude the USAGM is ‘still standing’ when its 80-year-old flagship news service, VOA, has gone completely dark with no signs of returning,” Lamberth wrote.

Jeffrey Gedmin, the president and chief executive of MBN, called the ruling “a crucial first step to allow MBN’s audience in the Middle East full access to America’s unique voice.”

MBN is a private, nonprofit Arabic-language broadcaster under USAGM founded in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks to provide reliable news coverage in the Middle East and to counter anti-American bias that plagues the region. Voice of America was founded to counter Nazi propaganda during World War II.

Writing in National Review last month, Gedmin argued that Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are “licking their chops” at the thought of his network’s demise. “Closing MBN is not making America great again in a region critical to President Trump’s foreign policy agenda,” he wrote.

Congress appropriated funding for the broadcasters in mid-March as part of its full-year continuing resolution, signed by President Donald Trump. But USAGM, at the direction of its senior advisor, Kari Lake, refused to distribute the money. The move came after Trump signed an executive order aimed at cutting the federal bureaucracy, including eliminating USAGM “to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.”

Critics of the move said that paring back the nation’s soft-power operations and ceding the ground to American adversaries was an unforced error. White House officials, including the president, accused to broadcasters of being left-wing propaganda outlets.