President Donald Trump issued an executive order last night that is supposed to end federal funding for the public TV network PBS and the public radio network NPR. Specifically, he ordered the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) to stop its direct subsidies to those networks "to the maximum extent allowed by law" and to revise its grants to individual stations to block them from spending taxpayers' money on PBS or NPR programs. The order also instructs all executive agencies to eliminate any flow of funds to the two networks, and it asks the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate whether the networks are guilty of illegal discrimination.
If you're a totebag-hating Tory who wants to kick Daniel Tiger off the dole, you may be in for some disappointment. That phrase "to the maximum extent allowed by law" did not come from nowhere; this move is guaranteed to run into legal trouble. It also seems, on the surface at least, to be bizarrely timed, since Congress is supposed to vote on a rescission bill soon that would cut off the CPB's money anyway.
The biggest legal issue here is pretty simple: The CPB is not a part of the executive branch, so it isn't clear how the president would have the authority to issue those demands. I don't mean that it is an "independent agency" like the Federal Trade Commission; I mean that it is not, officially, a government agency at all. The law that established the corporation said it "would not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government." As a statutory matter, it isn't an arm of the federal apparatus.
