NPR and Colorado public radio stations sue Trump White House

• By David Folkenflick/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 that purportedly bars 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’ power to direct how federal money will be spent and to pass laws. It names President Trump, White House budget director Russell Vought, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Maria Rosario Jackson, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, as defendants.

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.

PBS is not a party to the lawsuit. The television network issued a statement Tuesday morning saying, “PBS is considering every option, including taking legal action, to allow our organization to continue to provide essential programming and services to member stations and all Americans.”

“Our mission — and our responsibility — is grounded in the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of the press and protects our ability to hold those in power to account without interference,” the stations said in a joint statement. “This includes protection against government interference in our editorial decisions as well as in purchasing, acquiring, producing and broadcasting information.”

“Media to support a particular political party on the taxpayers’ dime”

Trump’s May 1st executive order took the form of a directive to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), 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.”

“The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) is creating media to support a particular political party on the taxpayers’ dime. Therefore, the President is exercising his lawful authority to limit funding to NPR and PBS,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesperson, in a statement on Tuesday. “The President was elected with a mandate to ensure efficient use of taxpayer dollars, and he will continue to use his lawful authority to achieve that objective.”

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 CPB 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 then 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.”