PBS President Says Trump’s Executive Order to End Funding Is “Blatantly Unlawful”

Paula Kerger is not taking these Trump cuts to PBS and NPR funding lying down. As a matter of fact, it sounds like she may take them into a court room.

In a statement shared with The Hollywood Reporter on Friday, Kerger, the president and CEO of PBS, called Trump’s latest executive order “blatantly unlawful,” said it “threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming, as we have for the past 50-plus years.”

Kerger also took a pretty good shot at how — and when — Trump put this into motion.

“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,” Kerger’s full statement reads. “We are currently exploring all options to allow PBS to continue to serve our member stations and all Americans.”

Kerger is not alone here. Patricia Harrison, the president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), also says Trump has no actual say in the funding.

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

“In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors,” Harrison continued.

In his executive order signed late Thursday night, Trump said the government’s funding of news media is “outdated and unnecessary,” as well as “corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”

Neither PBS and NPR “neither entity “presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens,” the White House continued. “The CPB Board shall cancel existing direct funding to the maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.”

Per a fact sheet provided to THR by PBS, public broadcasting costs about $1.60 per person, per year. The fact sheet stated that more than 70 percent of the received funding goes directly to public TV and radio stations.