Updated May 27, 2025 at 2:49 PM EDT
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,'" the legal filling for the public broadcasters states. "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."
The differing profiles of the three local stations joining NPR 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.
"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."
The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Randolph D. Moss, who is also handling a case involving a related lawsuit filed by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) against Trump.
"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 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."
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 to 10% of their revenues each year. (The NEA often gives smaller grants to NPR; the NEA terminated one such award to NPR the day after Trump's executive order, according to the lawsuit.)
The relationship between NPR and member stations is closely intertwined, 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. NPR does not own any stations itself.
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.
A multipronged attack on news outlets
The executive order is but one front in the Trump administration's assault on the news media writ large.
As a private citizen, Trump has sued ABC, CBS, Meta and X (formerly Twitter). All but CBS paid him settlements of $10 million or more, despite legal observers' saying the cases were weak.
CBS's parent company, Paramount Global is in settlement talks with Trump as federal regulators weigh whether to approve its $8 billion sale to Skydance Media. Trump sued CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris last fall. Trump alleged that the network's editing of her answer to a question about Israel and Gaza amounted to election fraud; media lawyers and First Amendment scholars almost universally say the case should be dismissed on Constitutional free speech protections.
Trump's appointee as chairperson of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, has said he is open to stripping CBS of the licenses it holds for local television stations over the 60 Minutes interview, saying "it's not a threat, that's a penalty."
Indeed, in just a few months as chair, Carr has initiated investigations of all the major broadcast networks — save Fox, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an ally of the president.
Yet public media has come in for particular focus.
Trump's Republican allies in the U.S. House held a hearing in March 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.)
Under Carr, the FCC is investigating the underwriting spots aired by NPR and PBS member stations. He suggested they are 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 CPB, though he has not sent lawmakers 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.
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