A control room in Arizona PBS offices in Phoenix is seen on Friday May 2, 2025. Earlier this month, President Trump published a decree which claimed to order the CPB board of directors to end federal funding in PBS and NPR.
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Katie Oyan / AP
Less than a day after President Trump attempted to dismiss three companies for the members of the board of directors of public broadcasting last month, the staff of DOGE also tried to award a team to examine its operations.
CPB leaders have denied this request, citing the federal law which establishes the independent non -profit organization outside the control of the federal government. The demand comes while the president launches a large assault against the two largest public broadcasters in the country. At the same time, the informal department of government efficiency sought to integrate into many independent agencies that Trump wishes to close.
These revelations are presented in court documents filed on Friday in a legal action where CPB challenges Trump’s efforts on April 28 to withdraw members of the board of directors, and after the president published a decree of May 1 which also claims to end any federal funding in the public radiudiffusion service and national radio.
According to the file, Nate Cavanaugh, a member of DOGE staff to the General Services Administration, sent an email to the two members of the board of directors not targeted by Trump as a meeting just before the hearing of the initial court in the CPB case.
“I would like to know more about the public broadcasting company and discuss a DOGE team assigned to the organization,” wrote Cavanaugh in an e-mail dated April 29.
A response of April 30 of the executive vice-president of CPB and Advocate General Evan Slavitt reiterated the position of the organization according to which the federal law stipulates that the CPB “will not be an agency or an establishment of the American government”.
“Consequently, neither DOGE, the GSA, nor any other component of the executive branch have a supervising role or having an activity relating to CPB,” wrote Slavitt.
Slavitt also said that the E-mail DOGE had been sent to two email addresses which are only used by the CPB expenses of expenses and are not the means to contact the members of the Board of Directors.
The Trump administration maintains that the Constitution gives the president “the power to withdraw the staff who exercise his executive authority,” said the White House spokesman Taylor Rogers.
The law seems to say the opposite.
Federal law is explicit on the structure and independence of CPB
In a section of the 1967 law on public publication, subtitled “interference or federal control”, the status does not authorize “no department, agency, officer or employee of the United States to exercise management, supervision or control over public telecommunications, or compared to the company or to one of its beneficiaries or entrepreneurs”.
After Trump published his executive decree which claimed to say that the CPB board of directors ends up ending federal funding in PBS and NPR, the leaders of the three organizations declared that the directive was also illegal, citing a section of the law which established CPB in a way “to offer maximum protection against interference and foreign control”.
The law also indicates that the funds allocated by the congress and distributed by CPB “can be used at the discretion of the beneficiary” and states the percentage of funds for public television, public radio at local and national levels.
The Congress allocated $ 535 million to CPB for the current financial year, a number which was unchanged in the last Stopgap spending plan that all republican legislators except two voted in March. The president indicated his interest in asking the congress to recover this funding using a process known as the renscission, although this request was not made and the approval is not guaranteed.
The executive decree also orders federal agencies to end any “direct or indirect” funding of NPR and PBS. Last week, the Ministry of Education informed the CPB that it ended its “Ready to Apparen” subsidy for educational television programming.
By asking the court to block the attempt to abolish Trump from the members of the board of directors, CPB said that he would not have a quorum to carry out business if the layoffs were confirmed, pointing a meeting previously provided for Tuesday, May 13, which would include legislative communication plans with the congress, a pending and potential dispute and the approval of subsidies.
“Without a legally constituted card, it cannot approve or give a direction on any of these questions,” said the file.
And although CPB says that it is not subject to the authority of the president, it should be noted that without quorum, the Council would not be able to promulgate the image of Trump’s management seeking to undo PBS and NPR.
The next hearing of the case is scheduled for May 14.
Disclosure: This story has been reported and written by NPR journalist Stephen Fowler and edited by Padmananda Rama, Emily Kopp, Vickie Walton-James and Gerry Holmes. As part of the NPR protocol to account for himself, no manager of the company or the director of the news examined this story before its publication publicly.
Do you have any information you want to share on DOGE access to independent agencies? Contact this author by encrypted communication on the signal. Stephen Fowler is at stphnfwlr.25. Please use an unused device.
