, public radio stations sue Trump White House over funding ban

The line about the “wolf” was drawn from a 1988 dissent by the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

The lawsuit says the administration is usurping Congress’ right to direct how federal money will be spent and to pass laws. It names President Trump, White House budget director Russel Vought, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Maria Rosario Jackson, the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, as defendants.

The White House did not immediately have a comment on the suit.

Trump’s May 1st order took the form of a directive to the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes more than a half-billion dollars each year to public broadcasters, primarily to local stations. By statute, three quarters of that money is devoted to television, one quarter to radio.

Trump’s legal standing to make such a decree was in question even before Tuesday’s lawsuit was filed.

Congress allocates money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting two years in advance to insulate public broadcasters from political pressure over fleeting controversies. The CPB was authorized by Congressional statute but set up as a private corporation. Indeed, the organization is itself suing Trump over an earlier decree, in which he claimed to be firing three of the five members of CPB’s board of directors.

“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority,” CPB chief Patricia Harrison, a former Republican National Committee co-chair, said in a statement. “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private noofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.”

In the statement, Harrison noted that the statute Congress passed to create CPB “expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors.”

The executive order is one front in the Trump administration’s attack on public media – itself a part of a larger assault on the news media writ large.

And Trump has called on Congress to eliminate all current and future funding for public media and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, though he has not sent a formal request for the current funding to be clawed back.

Earlier this spring, the Republican-led Congress passed a stop-gap budget measure that fully funds CPB through the end of September 2027.