National Public Radio filed suit against the Trump administration on Tuesday for its move to withhold funds approved by Congress.
NPR filed the suit along with three Colorado public radio stations in response to President Donald Trump’s executive order to end funding for NPR and PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service. The lawsuit states the Trump administration has gone around congressional duties to direct how federal money is spent.
“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,’” the lawsuit said. “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 lawsuit states the order “also threatens the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information” and that it “expressly aims to punish and control Plaintiffs’ news coverage and other speech the Administration deems ‘biased.’”
Attorneys for the news outlets wrote that the order “cannot stand.”
The lawsuit names Trump, Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Maria Rosario Jackson, the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, as defendants. Trump and his allies have called the public broadcasters “left-wing propaganda.”
“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.
Every two years, Congress allocates funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The CPB is also suing Trump over an earlier move, in which he attempted to fire three of the five members of CPB’s board of directors.
Earlier this year, the Republican-led Congress passed a stopgap budget measure to fund CPB through the end of September 2027.
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In response to Trump’s order, in which he said he was withholding CPB funding to NPR and PBS, the corporation’s chief executive said the president did not have the authority to carry out such a move.
“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority,” CPB chief Patricia Harrison, a former Republican National Committee co-chairwoman, said in a statement. “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.”
