In early May, Trump ordered Public Broadcasting, which distributed federal funds allocated by Congress to the media, to reduce the budget of NPR and PBS to the legal minimum, and to stop funding them in the future.
A judge in Washington on Tuesday declared unconstitutional Donald Trump’s executive order to cut federal funding to public media outlets NPR and PBS, in what is a new legal defeat for the Republican’s policies.
In his text, judge Randolph Moss indicated that Trump’s action against the broadcasters violates the right to freedom of the press guaranteed in the First Amendment of the Constitution and amounts to “discrimination”, after having accused them of “leftist bias”.
Moss ruled in favor of PBS and NPR, which had sued the government in May 2025, as they understood that Trump did not have the authority to act as “arbiter of programming content.”
In this way, the court reversed the budget cuts to National Public Radio and the US Public Broadcasting Service (NPR and PBS, in their acronyms in English), although the Executive must appeal the decision.
This decision comes days after another federal judge ordered, on March 17, the reestablishment of Voice of America operations and the reinstatement of 1,042 of the 1,147 employees placed on administrative leave a year ago, when Trump sought to close the historic broadcaster, financed by the government.
In early May, Trump ordered Public Broadcasting, which distributes federal funds allocated by Congress to the media, to reduce the budget of NPR and PBS to the legal minimum, and to stop funding them in the future.
Although federal funds represent just one percent of NPR’s total budget, they make up eight to ten percent of those of its more than 1,300 affiliated stations. In the case of PBS and associated companies, around 15% of their revenue comes from Public Broadcasting.
