A federal judge has ruled that President Trump’s efforts to defund PBS and NPR were unlawful, finding that a May 2025 executive order infringed on the news organisations’ First Amendment rights.
“The Executive Order seeks to exclude NPR and PBS from receiving federal grants or other funding … because their news coverage, in his view, tips left, and because they were critical of him,” U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss said in a 62-page opinion and order Tuesday. “It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the President does not like and seeks to squelch.”
“The message is clear: NPR and PBS need not apply for any federal benefit because the president disapproves of their ‘left-wing’ coverage of the news,” continued Judge Moss, an Obama appointee. However, he noted, the First Amendment, “does not tolerate viewpoint discrimination and retaliation of this type.”
The rebuke came a little under a year after Trump signed an executive order last May titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidisation of Biased Media,” which directed federal agencies to terminate “any direct or indirect funding of NPR and PBS” over alleged “bias” in the outlets’ reporting and their “partisan” news coverage.
The public broadcasters quickly took the Trump administration to court, vehemently disputing the White House’s accusations of bias, and arguing that the executive order violated the First Amendment.
“Regardless of any policy disagreements over the role of public television, our Constitution and laws forbid the President from serving as the arbiter of the content of PBS’s programming, including by attempting to defund PBS,” attorneys for PBS said in its lawsuit. “The [executive order] makes no attempt to hide the fact that it is cutting off the flow of funds to PBS because of the content of PBS programming and out of a desire to alter the content of speech. That is blatant viewpoint discrimination and an infringement of PBS and PBS Member Stations’ private editorial discretion.”
On Tuesday, Judge Moss ruled in the news organisations’ favour, saying the executive order “singles out two speakers and, on the basis of their speech, bars them from all federally funded programs.”
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While the executive order was deemed unlawful and unenforceable by Judge Moss, a Republican-majority Congress previously voted to rescind $500 million in annual funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was the agency responsible for dispersing the federal funds to PBS and NPR, according to The New York Times. And after the executive order was issued, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting shut down.
From Rolling Stone US
