NPR has filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump challenging his executive order to end federal funding for NPR and PBS.

NPR, Colorado Public Radio, Aspen Public Radio and KSUT Public Radio filed the lawsuit Tuesday in federal court in Washington, D.C. They argue that Trump’s order violates the First Amendment’s protections of speech and the press. 

“The president has no authority under the Constitution to take such actions,” the lawsuit adds. “On the contrary, the power of the purse is reserved to Congress.”

The suit claims the order “threatens the existence of a public radio system that millions of Americans across the country rely on for vital news and information.” 

In his order, which directs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to freeze all funding to NPR and PBS, Trump said that government funding of the news is “not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”

He argued that NPR and PBS are “biased” and said taxpayer support should go to “fair, accurate, unbiased and nonpartisan news coverage.”

NPR has claimed just 1 percent of its funding comes from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. But this has been debunked, as the 1 percent represents only direct funding, not the larger portion of its revenue NPR receives from local public radio stations, which use federal funds to purchase programming produced by NPR. For example, in 2021, NPR reported $90 million in revenue from “contracts from customers,” a substantial portion of its $279 million overall funding.

Attorneys for the news outlets say the order “expressly aims to punish and control Plaintiffs’ news coverage and other speech the Administration deems ‘biased.’”

“The Order is textbook retaliation and viewpoint-based discrimination in violation of the First Amendment,” they wrote.

The lawsuit seeks to have the order permanently blocked and declared unconstitutional.

National Review‘s editors called last year to defund NPR, saying it has “every right to operate as a left-wing propaganda outlet masquerading as a legitimate news organization. But it is not entitled to pursue this goal with taxpayer money.”

The editorial was published in response to an essay from Uri Berliner, an NPR veteran of 25 years, who wrote an essay about the network’s evolution from having a liberal bent to having an outright ideological bias for the Free Press on his way out the door.

He noted several incidents of bias, including with its coverage of the Russian-collusion story — and later silence on the Mueller report’s conclusion that there was no collusion — alongside its refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story or the Covid lab leak theory in 2020.