NPR sued President Donald Trump over his executive order cutting federal funding for NPR and PBS.
The suit, filed in a Washington, DC federal court by NPR and public radio stations in Colorado, claims that Trump’s effort to slash the broadcasters’ congressionally granted funding is unconstitutional. It also alleges that Trump violated the First Amendment by characterizing NPR and PBS as “biased media” and rescinding their federal funding as a result.
“It is not always obvious when the government has acted with a retaliatory purpose in violation of the First Amendment,” the complaint reads. “‘But this wolf comes as a wolf.’” Trump has accused NPR and PBS of having content that is not “fair, accurate, or unbiased,” the complaint claims, and his and other administration officials’ comments about public broadcasters “only drive home” the executive order’s “retaliatory purpose.”
In an April 1st post on Truth Social, for example, Trump described NPR and PBS as “RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY.”
The complaint notes that the Supreme Court recently ruled that “it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression — to ‘un-bias’ what it thinks is biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences.” The lawsuit alleges that Trump’s executive order “expressly aims to punish and control” NPR and PBS’s “news coverage and other speech that the administration deems ‘biased.’”
Beyond the First Amendment issues, the suit claims that Trump is violating a basic tenet of the separation of powers: Congress’s ability to determine how federal funds are spent.
“The president has no authority under the Constitution to take such actions,” the complaint reads. “On the contrary, the power of the purse is reserved to Congress.”
Congress doesn’t fund NPR or PBS directly, instead allocating money to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) which then distributes funds to public broadcasters. CPB — a private corporation authorized by congressional statute — receives funding two years in advance.
NPR receives about 1 percent of its annual revenue from CPB. Local stations are more dependent on it, receiving 8 to 10 percent of their annual revenues from the corporation. PBS receives roughly 15 percent of its revenue from CPB.
In a statement to NPR, CPB chief Patricia Harrison said Trump doesn’t have authority over CPB. “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government,” said Harrison, a former co-chair of the Republican National Committee. Harrison added that when creating CPB, Congress “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.”
Trump’s executive order is one of several administration efforts to strip public broadcasting of its federal funding. In January, Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Brendan Carr launched an investigation into whether NPR and PBS violated FCC guidelines by airing commercials.
“To the extent that taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements,” Carr wrote in a letter to the heads of NPR and PBS, “then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars.”