‘Wholly Independent of the Federal Government’

Trump has signed order to terminate federal funding for NPR and PBS over left-wing reporting bias

After President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to end federal funding for NPR and PBS, the CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which disburses the funding to those broadcasters, claimed the corporation is exempt from the president’s oversight.

“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority,” CEO Patricia Harrison said Friday morning in a statement, according to the New York Times. “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.”

Harrison did not note that the president picks the nine members of the CPB’s board of directors or that Congress controls federal funding to the corporation.

Trump’s executive order instructs the CPB to cut off all direct federal funding for NPR and PBS to the “maximum extent allowed by law” and “decline to provide future funding.” The order also demands that CPB officials take steps to “minimize or eliminate” any indirect funding to the broadcasters.

NPR and PBS—America’s two biggest public broadcasters—have long faced public scrutiny over left-wing political bias in their coverage, even as the networks have received federal funding for decades. In the 2025 fiscal year alone, NPR and PBS received around $535 million from the federal government.

During a March congressional hearing, NPR CEO Katherine Maher, who has called Trump a “deranged racist sociopath,” acknowledged that the outlet delivered poor coverage of two politically charged stories: the Hunter Biden laptop and the origins of COVID-19.

NPR was “mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively and sooner,” Maher said at the hearing. She also acknowledged that “the new CIA evidence” about the Wuhan lab leak “is worthy of coverage.”

In response to Trump’s Thursday order, NPR said that eliminating CPB funding “would have a devastating impact on American communities” that rely on public radio for news, emergency alerts, and public safety information, according to the Times.

PBS has also condemned the order. “The President’s blatantly unlawful Executive Order, issued in the middle of the night, threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming, as we have for the past 50-plus years,” PBS CEO Paula Kerger said Friday morning.