NPR, public radio stations sue Trump White House over funding ban : NPR

NPR and three Colorado public radio stations filed suit Tuesday morning in federal court against the Trump White House over the president’s executive order purportedly barring the use of Congressionally appropriated funds for NPR and PBS.

“It is not always obvious when the government has acted with a retaliatory purpose in violation of the First Amendment. ‘But this wolf comes as a wolf,'” states the legal brief for the public broadcasters. “The Order targets NPR and PBS expressly because, in the President’s view, their news and other content is not ‘fair, accurate, or unbiased.'”

The line about the “wolf” was drawn from a 1988 dissent by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

The lawsuit says the administration is usurping Congress’ right to direct how federal money will be spent and to pass laws. It names President Trump, White House budget director Russel Vought, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Maria Rosario Jackson, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, as defendants.

The White House did not immediately have a comment on the suit.

A team that includes noted free speech lawyer Theodore J. Boutrous filed the lawsuit for NPR and the Colorado stations jointly in the District of Columbia. The suit calls Trump’s early May executive order “textbook retaliation” and an existential threat to the public radio system “that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information.”

“The Executive Order is a clear violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech and association, and freedom of the press,” NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher said in a statement.

The differing profiles of the three stations joining in the suit capture the appeal and reach of the broader public radio system: the statewide Colorado Public Radio, which is based in Denver; Aspen Public Radio which broadcasts throughout the Roaring Fork Valley; and KSUT, originally founded by the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and now serving four federally recognized tribes in the Four Corners region in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.

Trump’s May 1st order took the form of a directive to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes more than a half-billion dollars each year to public broadcasters, primarily to local stations. By statute, three quarters of that money is devoted to television, one quarter to radio.

Trump cited his authority as president under the Constitution and federal laws in making the order and said that neither NPR nor PBS “presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.” In other public statements, Trump and his allies have called the public broadcasters “left-wing propaganda” and made similarly disparaging remarks. An accompanying fact sheet put out by the White House cited the claim that NPR published articles “insist[ing] that COVID-19 did not originate in a lab” and “refused to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story.”

NPR’s Maher rejected such ideological characterizations, pointing to such statements by Trump to argue he was seeking to exact illegal retribution for their news coverage.

“This is retaliatory, viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of the First Amendment. The Supreme Court has ruled numerous times over the past 80 years that the government does not have the right to determine what counts as ‘biased,’ Maher said in her statement Tuesday. “NPR will never agree to this infringement of our constitutional rights, or the constitutional rights of our Member stations, and NPR will not compromise our commitment to an independent free press and journalistic integrity.”

Trump’s legal standing to make such a decree was in question even before Tuesday’s lawsuit was filed.

Congress allocates money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting two years in advance to insulate public broadcasters from political pressure over fleeting controversies. The CPB was authorized by Congressional statute but set up as a private corporation. Indeed, the organization is itself suing Trump over an earlier decree, in which he claimed to be firing three of the five members of CPB’s board of directors.

When Trump said he was ordering the CPB not to fund NPR or PBS any longer, the corporation’s chief executive said he had no ability to do so.

“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority,” CPB chief Patricia Harrison, a former Republican National Committee co-chair, said in a statement. “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.”

In the statement, Harrison noted that the statute Congress passed to create CPB “expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors.”

Harrison and CPB have effectively ignored Trump’s orders – retaining, for now, its board members, as the case works through the federal courts – and taking no actions to withhold money from NPR and PBS or the hundreds of stations that send funds to the two national broadcasters.

Trump specified in his order that recipients of federal funds from CPB could not, under his decree, send money to PBS and NPR. NPR typically receives about 1% of its annual revenues from the CPB and another several percent indirectly from stations. On average, CPB provides each public radio station 8-10% of their revenues each year.

The relationship is closely intertwined, however, with public radio considering itself an interconnected system. NPR’s weekly audience for its programs, articles, podcasts and other offerings exceeds 43 million Americans, according to the network, including through its local stations.

Local station reporters appear frequently on NPR news magazines; the network often provides editing and guidance for regional collaborations between local stations; and NPR News member stations pledge to adhere to a shared set of ethical standards. NPR manages and operates the terrestrial distribution system allowing member stations and community broadcasters to deliver and download content for broadcast. Additionally, the network and its member stations rely on CPB to help acquire rights to broadcast music for use on its shows.

The executive order is one front in the Trump administration’s attack on public media – itself a part of a larger assault on the news media writ large.

Trump’s Republican allies in the U.S. House held a hearing at which Maher was assailed for both personal social media posts showing a liberal tilt years before she joined the network, and journalism published before her arrival. (In her testimony, Maher pointed to NPR’s policies that include a firewall preventing corporate executives from making editorial judgments for the newsroom.) PBS chief Paula Kerger was asked about a video posted on a New York City public television’s website featuring a drag queen for a show intended for young children. (Kerger said it never ran on television and was taken down.)

Trump’s appointee as chairperson of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has launched investigations of the underwriting spots aired by NPR and PBS member stations. He suggested they were indistinguishable from commercials on for-profit networks, a violation of federal statute. (PBS and NPR say they have worked closely with agency staffers for decades to ensure those spots adhere to the law.) Carr’s FCC oversees to whom licenses are granted to broadcast using the federal airwaves.

And Trump has called on Congress to eliminate all current and future funding for public media and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, though he has not sent a formal request for the current funding to be clawed back.

Earlier this spring, the Republican-led Congress passed a stop-gap budget measure that fully funds CPB through the end of September 2027.

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp, Managing Editor Vickie Walton-James and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR’s protocol for reporting on itself, no corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.