Trump’s NPR-PBS Funding Fight Quietly Comes To An End.

The court battle over President Trump’s attempt to cut off federal funding to NPR and PBS has quietly come to an end, leaving intact a ruling that the executive order’s principal funding restrictions violated the First Amendment.

NPR, PBS, several local public broadcasters and the Trump administration agreed in July to dismiss the last remaining claims in the consolidated cases. The move ends the litigation and leaves intact the court’s March decision permanently blocking key provisions of the executive order, which the administration did not appeal.

The dismissal applies to the unresolved challenges involving portions of Executive Order 14290 titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization Of Biased Media,” which Trump issued in May 2025. The provisions directed federal agencies to examine whether they could end existing agreements with NPR and PBS and called for a review of the organizations’ compliance with federal employment discrimination law.

That quickly led to a lawsuit brought by several public media organizations, which called the order “a clear violation of the Constitution and the First Amendment’s protections for freedom of speech and association, and freedom of the press.”

The agreement to end the court proceeding follows the March decision by U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss declaring portions of the executive order unlawful and unenforceable. Those provisions stated that NPR and PBS didn’t present a fair and unbiased account of current events and directed federal agencies to stop providing them with direct or indirect funding.

Moss concluded the provisions amounted to viewpoint discrimination and retaliation prohibited by the First Amendment. He said the order singled out NPR and PBS based on their speech and attempted to exclude them from federal programs without regard to how the money would be used.

The court permanently barred federal agencies from implementing or enforcing the funding cutoff. But it didn’t impose an injunction directly against Trump. Moss said relief against the agencies responsible for implementing the order was sufficient.

The judge declined to decide whether the executive order provisions were also unconstitutional. He said the parties had provided little information about whether either had caused, or was likely to cause, a concrete injury to NPR or PBS. The ruling allowed the parties to renew their arguments if they could establish a live dispute involving those provisions.

But the Trump administration didn’t appeal that judgment. Instead, it joined public broadcasters in asking the court to dismiss the unresolved claims, effectively ending the case while preserving the court’s First Amendment ruling and permanent injunction. The claims were dismissed without prejudice, however, meaning they could potentially be revived.

Since the litigation began in May 2025, the landscape has significantly altered for public media. Congress rescinded fiscal year 2026 and 2027 appropriations for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in July 2025, and CPB’s board later voted to dissolve the organization. Moss consequently found that claims involving CPB and its implementation of the executive order had become moot.

One other footnote from the case comes in a court filing earlier this month that showed an attorney working on the case has departed the DOJ. Attorney Sean Skedzielewski had a controversial tenure. In February, the Freedom of the Press Foundation filed an attorney disciplinary complaint against him over statements he made to a federal judge while allegedly defending ICE agents’ interactions with journalists.