NPR sues Trump over order to cut funding, cites free speech
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Background: The National Public Radio (NPR) headquarters is photographed on May 2, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Sipa USA)(Sipa via AP Images). Inset: President Donald Trump is attentive 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 filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump concerning his executive order to eliminate its federal funding, claiming that he is breaching the Constitution and retaliating over its news coverage of issues like Hunter Biden and the origins of COVID-19.

Trump’s May 1 executive order targets NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service, both of which receive taxpayer funds through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The order alleges that neither NPR nor PBS “provides a fair, accurate, or unbiased representation of current events to taxpaying citizens.”

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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and that it is “filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options, making government funding of news media outdated, unnecessary, and corrosive to journalistic independence.”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.

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