Background: The National Public Radio (NPR) headquarters is seen on May 2, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images). Inset: President Donald Trump listens during the 157th National Memorial Day Observance at Arlington National Cemetery, Monday, May 26, 2025, in Arlington, Va. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
National Public Radio has sued President Donald Trump over his executive order stripping its federal funding, arguing he is violating the Constitution and seeking revenge over its news coverage of topics including Hunter Biden and the origins of COVID-19.
Trump’s May 1 executive order targets NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service, which are granted taxpayer funds through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The order claims neither NPR nor PBS “presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”
The CPB already sued the Trump administration in March over the president’s attempt to fire three of its five board members. On Tuesday, NPR and three of its member stations — Colorado Public Radio, Aspen Public Radio, and KSUT — filed their own lawsuit, arguing Trump’s order demonstrates an “overt retaliatory purpose.”
“The Order is unlawful in multiple ways. It flatly contravenes statutes duly enacted by Congress and violates the Separation of Powers and the Spending Clause by disregarding Congress’s express commands,” the lawsuit reads, referring to how Congress appropriated funds for the organization. “It also violates the First Amendment’s guarantees of freedom of speech and of the press.”
The order “expressly aims to punish and control Plaintiffs’ news coverage and other speech the Administration deems ‘biased,”” the lawsuit continues.
The White House released a “fact sheet” along with the executive order, in which the administration argued the nation’s media landscape has shifted so much since the CPB’s inception in 1967 and that it is “filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options, making government funding of news media outdated, unnecessary, and corrosive to journalistic independence.”
The administration also alleged that NPR and PBS “have fueled partisanship and left-wing propaganda with taxpayer dollars.” The White House pointed to NPR’s coverage, or lack thereof, of the COVID-19 China lab leak theory and the 2020 Hunter Biden laptop story, which NPR CEO and President Katherine Maher admitted in March that the organization should have reported on “more aggressively and sooner.”
Maher, however, maintains the order stripping NPR’s funding is “retaliatory” and a “clear violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech and association, and freedom of the press,” she said in a statement.
“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,’” she added.
PBS did not join the lawsuit, but said in a statement: “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.”
When approached by Law&Crime for comment on the NPR lawsuit, White House spokesman Harrison Fields accused CPB of “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. 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,” Fields, principal deputy press secretary and special assistant to the president, added.
