President Donald Trump handed down an executive order May 1 prohibiting National Public Radio and television’s Public Broadcasting Service from receiving any money from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which allocates money to NPR member stations like KPCW.
NPR and three Colorado member stations sued May 27, and University of Virginia law professor Scott Ballenger broke it down on KPCW’s “Local News Hour.”
“NPR has the usual argument that's been made against a lot of Trump administration initiatives lately: that they just don't have authority to decree all of these things by executive fiat,” Ballenger said. “If they want to fundamentally change how the [CPB] works, they should go through Congress and pass legislation. But here, that argument is even sharper than usual, because the statutes Congress passed actually seem to directly forbid political interference with the corporation.”
That is, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which set up CPB, does not allow “any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision or control over public telecommunications, or over the Corporation … or public telecommunications entity.”
The Trump administration hadn’t responded to the lawsuit as of May 30, but Ballenger thinks it will argue that part of the Public Broadcasting Act is unconstitutional.
“The Court recently ruled in a case called Trump v. Wilcox that the president can fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board, despite statutes saying very clearly otherwise,” he said. “This is a sort of ‘unitary executive’ argument that the president really has to be in charge of the executive branch.”
On the other hand, most courts have preserved the independence of the nation’s central bank, for example, since the election.
“Who knows what that means for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the point is that this dispute over the statutory independence of the Corporation is just one front in a much larger war about independent agencies more broadly,” Ballenger said. He expects the lawsuit to move slowly. On May 30, PBS and a Minnesota public TV station filed a similar lawsuit against the White House.
A relatively small fraction of the $535 million CPB annually hands out goes directly to NPR, which doesn’t own or operate any radio stations.
The vast majority goes to stations like KPCW. Stations are required by the Public Broadcasting Act to spend about three quarters of its CPB allocation on nationally-distributed content from services like NPR, American Public Media or Public Radio Exchange.
By subscribing to NPR shows, KPCW is branded a “member station.”
Trump’s executive order is aimed to stop stations from paying NPR with CPB money, but it doesn’t say anything about stations receiving that money in the first place.
Congress is in charge of how much money CPB gets to distribute, and The New York Times reported last month that Trump plans to ask legislators to rescind $1.1 billion they already awarded to CPB.
