Recommendations of the Editorial team
A federal judge has ruled that President Trump’s attempts to defund PBS and NPR were unlawful. An order from May 2025 violated the First Amendment rights of news organizations.
“The order seeks to exclude NPR and PBS from federal grants or other funding … because their reporting has, in the President’s opinion, leaned to the left and because they have criticized him,” U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss said in a 62-page ruling Tuesday. “It is difficult to imagine clearer evidence that a government action is aimed at silencing viewpoints the president dislikes.”
“The message is clear: NPR and PBS do not need to apply for federal funding because the president rejects their ‘left-wing’ reporting,” continued Judge Moss, an Obama appointee. But the First Amendment, Moss said, “does not tolerate discrimination based on opinions or retaliation of this kind.”
Background of the decree
The reprimand was preceded by an executive order that Trump signed last May entitled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media”. In it, he ordered federal agencies to end “all direct or indirect funding of NPR and PBS,” citing alleged “bias” in reporting and “partisan” news selection by the networks.
The public broadcasters then immediately took the Trump administration to court, vehemently denying the allegations of bias and arguing that the order violated the First Amendment.
“Regardless of any political disagreements about the role of public television, our Constitution and laws prohibit the President from acting as an arbiter of the content of PBS programs, including by seeking to defund PBS,” PBS lawyers said in the lawsuit. “The order makes no secret of the fact that it is withdrawing funding from PBS because the president dislikes the content of PBS programming and wants to change it. This is blatant opinion discrimination and an infringement on the editorial independence of PBS and its member stations.”
Judgment and consequences
On Tuesday, Judge Moss ruled in favor of the news organizations, finding that the order “singles out two speakers and excludes them from all federally funded programs based on their statements.”
Although Judge Moss declared the order illegal and unenforceable, a Republican-dominated Congress had previously voted to cut the annual funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting – the agency responsible for distributing federal money to PBS and NPR – by $500 million, the New York Times reported. After the decree, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ceased operations.
