NPR sued President Trump on Tuesday over his executive order that aims to end federal funding for NPR and PBS.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Washington by NPR and other public radio organizations, including Colorado Public Radio and Aspen Public Radio, said Mr. Trump’s order violated the Constitution and the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech.
“The president has no authority under the Constitution to take such actions,” the lawsuit said. “On the contrary, the power of the purse is reserved to Congress.”
The White House had no immediate comment.
This month, Mr. Trump signed an executive order ordering the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which backs NPR and PBS, to freeze all funding to those organizations. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting spends more than $500 million on public radio and TV stations annually.
Only a fraction of NPR’s budget — about 2 percent — comes directly from federal grants. Most of the funding goes to local public radio and TV stations across the U.S., helping fund their operations and create programming. About 15 percent of PBS’s budget comes from federal grants.
Mr. Trump said in his executive order that NPR and PBS were “biased” and that taxpayer support should go to “fair, accurate, unbiased and nonpartisan news coverage.” Public media leaders, including Katherine Maher, NPR’s chief executive, and Paula Kerger, the chief executive of PBS, condemned the executive order shortly after it was signed.
Mr. Trump’s executive order is one of several attempts by Republicans to weaken U.S. public media. The White House threatened to rescind public funding for TV and radio stations last month, and legislation is currently working its way through Congress to defund NPR and PBS. Last month, the White House tried to fire several members of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which sued to block the attempt.
In its lawsuit, NPR asked the court to throw out Mr. Trump’s executive order on the grounds that it was unconstitutional and to prevent the president from enforcing it. The lawsuit also asked the court to declare that the National Endowment for Arts could not withhold funding from public media organizations based on Mr. Trump’s executive order.
In a statement, Ms. Maher said that public media in the United States was “an irreplaceable foundation of American civic life.”
“At its best, it reflects our nation back to itself in all our complexity, contradictions and commonalities, and connects our communities across differences and divides,” she wrote.
Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at [email protected].
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