Federal Judge Blocks Trump Order to Cut Funds for NPR and PBS

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from cutting federal funding for public media, including National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.

Randolph Moss, a U.S. district judge for the District of Columbia, declared in a 62-page opinion Tuesday that the moves were “unlawful and unenforceable because [they] are viewpoint discriminatory and retaliatory.”

“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,” Moss added.

Trump issued an executive order in May of last year targeting NPR and PBS, arguing that they held a liberal bias.

“Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter,” the executive order read. “Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage.”

The order to cut $1.1 billion allocated across 330 PBS and 246 NPR stations throughout the country forced the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which managed the funding to local affiliates, to close its doors earlier this year.

The CPB said in January that its leadership determined that “without the resources to fulfill its congressionally mandated responsibilities, maintaining the corporation as a nonfunctional entity would not serve the public interest or advance the goals of public media.”

NPR, along with other local stations, sued the Trump administration within days of the executive order, saying that Trump had acted beyond the powers of the presidency.

Moss had previously ruled in favor of the CPB in the case, granting the organization a $36 million settlement to operate the country’s public radio system.

Moss ruled on Tuesday that the administration’s justification for eliminating the funding was a violation of the First Amendment. He ordered any federal agencies involved in enforcing the executive order “be permanently enjoined from taking action to implement” it.

“The Federal Defendants fail to cite a single case in which a court has ever upheld a statute or executive action that bars a particular person or entity from participating in any federally funded activity based on that person or entity’s past speech,” Ross wrote.

The legal counsel for the public media organizations, Theodore Boutrous, described Tuesday’s ruling as “a victory for the First Amendment and for freedom of the press.”

“As the Court expressly recognized, the First Amendment draws a line, which the government may not cross, at efforts to use government power — including the power of the purse — ‘to punish or suppress disfavored expression’ by others,” he continued. “The Executive Order crossed that line.”