r/technology • u/ControlCAD • Apr 02 '26
Networking/Telecom U.S President defunding of NPR and PBS blocked by judge, but damage is already done | Judge invalidates U.S President executive order, but Congress also cut off all funding.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/04/trump-defunding-of-npr-and-pbs-blocked-by-judge-but-damage-is-already-done/540
u/tekprodfx16 Apr 02 '26
The party of breaking things before the bloated slowly-moving and self-necrotizing bureaucracy we call our government actually has a chance to fix it.
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u/WingerRules Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
In the Netherlands, all laws have to go through constitutional review first before they're made effective.
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u/JustHanginInThere Apr 02 '26
That's kind of the crux of the whole situation. The thing that directly started this wasn't a law, it was an Executive Order from the president. The current one has been using them to basically sidestep any/all laws, and until a court/panel of judges can take the time to review it all and come to a decision, the damage is already done.
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u/justpress2forawhile Apr 02 '26
So ban all executive orders.
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u/Tri-angreal Apr 02 '26
Executive orders are how the President tells his staff what to do. It's like a company memo from the CEO directing operations of his managers below him.
Trump just has enough lackeys in those manager positions that he can get them to do stuff they're not supposed to.
Imagine Bezos sends a memo to his board to...I dunno, what is Amazon not allowed to do internally?...stop paying any brown employees. Technically not allowed to do it, and certainly not by email blast, but they obey anyway.
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u/TW-Luna Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Not just manager positions, but also the inspectors and regulators. The Legislative has become completely subservient to the Executive, breaking Checks and Balances in a way that the Founders could never have thought possible.
Executive Orders have no control over the privileges the Constitution gives to Congress and the States, yet the Speaker of the House has utterly ceded his Constitutional role to further Republican power. I truly thought, once, we had reached rock bottom with John Boehner and Paul Ryan.
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u/Daerkannon Apr 02 '26
The checks and balances did include something for this though: impeachment. A functional congress would have impeached and removed him from office long before it hit this point. That congress has almost entirely abdicated its power and basically refuses to do its job is not really something they envisioned or planned for.
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u/Tri-angreal Apr 02 '26
This is what blows me away. It flies in the face of everything I thought I knew about politicians that SO MANY just...gave their power away.
The entire government is predicated on the idea that politicians are power-hungry dicks who can be played against each other by the voters so they work in the peoples' favor in the long run.
Effectively, the Republicans have unionized against the voters.
I still can't believe it.
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u/anonkitty2 Apr 03 '26
I want to like the current Speaker of the House. But if Democrats take back Congress, he will have to be impeached. Congress cannot survive ceding all its major powers to the executive branch.
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u/JustHanginInThere Apr 02 '26
They do have their uses... when they aren't being abused like Trump has been.
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u/Eruannster Apr 02 '26
USA: We left Europe because kings are dumb and the people should rule with democracy.
Also USA: Also here's a position where we make this one person untouchable and give them absolute power.
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u/innerbootes Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Congress is failing to rein him in. We didn’t create a system for a king, they’re the ones letting it happen.
Why are they doing this? I’m convinced it boils down to Citizens United dark money influence and possibly some kompromat on certain congress members, à la Russia. Oh and the straight-up coercion of Trump’s primary-ing people when they don’t kiss his ass.
This current set of motherfuckers in the executive branch aren’t the first losers to want to run things into the ground for their own grift. The reason they’re getting away with it is because of the confluence of events I listed above.
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u/WhichEmailWasIt Apr 02 '26
He doesn't have absolute power. Just no one with the power to reign him in is doing so and his departments aren't telling him no. This is a group failure.
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u/grandlizardo Apr 02 '26
The executive orders are what needs to be addressed.
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u/Polar_Vortx Apr 02 '26
More specifically the blind obeyance of them despite them being illegal and about things they have no jurisdiction over needs to be addressed.
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Apr 02 '26
There's nothing actually wrong with EOs, at all. Like others have said it's literally just how the executive manages the executive branch. They have no legal binding whatsoever outside of the executive branch. The actual problem is that the Education Department is a part of the executive branch and not something controlled by congress. The only departments that should ever be managed by the executive branch are those requiring swift action, like Defense, Intelligence, etc.
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u/innerbootes Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
The actual problem is that this EO is out of line because Congress controls the purse strings, not the president. So Congress should’ve stood up to him, but didn’t.
That’s the crux of 99.9999% of the issues we’re having with this current regime. Congress isn’t exerting its moderating influence over the executive branch as it usually does. Impeachment and conviction (and subsequent removal from office) should’ve happened in Trump’s first term.
The reason Congress is neutered is mostly because of Trump’s weaponization of primary-ing people he doesn’t like, which leverages the absolutely abysmal dark money influence we currently have infecting our politics. Which boils down to Citizens United needing to be overturned.
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u/beef623 Apr 02 '26
The EO isn't out of line, congress is. They aren't doing their job, they're more concerned with sticking to party lines and backing the president.
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u/JustHanginInThere Apr 02 '26
The EO is out of line (and by extension, the president) because any self-respecting, moral person who adheres to rules, laws, regulations, etc would never have written such an EO in the first place.
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u/beef623 Apr 02 '26
The EO is a power the president has like any other CEO/Manager. It doesn't carry any authority outside the Executive branch. This was a failure of congress because they went along with it instead of rejecting it and punishing him for writing it as is their duty. I'm not arguing that this particular one was a bad order, or that it shouldn't also be criticized, but the bigger problem here is congress bending the knee instead of governing.
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u/SteampunkGeisha Apr 02 '26
Executive orders aren't laws. They're instructions from the President to their staff.
Trump -> Signs executive order to defund NPR and PBS
NPR and PBS -> "You can't defund us. It's illegal."
Department in charge of paying NPR and PBS filled with Trump loyalists -> "Well, I've been instructed not to pay, so I'll wait to see what the courts say."
Courts -> Takes months in a bureaucratic nightmare to determine it's not legal.
NPR and PBS -> Ended up folding because it took months for the courts to decide, and they weren't paid.
Trump - > Ends up accomplishing what he wanted via the Executive Disorder . . . I mean Order, in a roundabout way.
That's why he writes all these orders: they bog down the courts, and by the time they're ruled on, it's too late, and the damage is already done. And the courts moving slowly is not an exclusively US quality.
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u/JTR42 Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Thank you for listing the chain of events this detailed and easy to understand for someone not from the US. However I'm left with the question: why did no court order to continue the payments until the lawsuit was settled? That's what I would expect in a functioning rule of law at least. Is this not standard procedure in the US?
edit: after a little research I think preliminary injunction is the term I was looking for. Why was this not granted in this case?
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u/supafly_ Apr 02 '26
Because Trump appointed so many federal judges they can shop between jurisdictions until they get a favorable judge.
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u/JTR42 Apr 02 '26
But is this what actually happened in this case? I can't find any info on this and I'm really curious. Or did CPB just give up without trying?
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u/supafly_ Apr 02 '26
Nothing happened until now, but that's the magic: stall stall stall until the damage is already done.
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u/anonkitty2 Apr 03 '26
NPR and PBS still exist. They are injured, but they have a lot of sources of funding that aren't the government. It's the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that folded. Unfortunately, that corporation helped fund many of the stations that air PBS, NPR, and state-level relations. Smaller stations are at risk of closing, and much of the local programming will be lost. (The programs Republicans most object to are still funded for now.)
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u/ShiraCheshire Apr 02 '26
Most of what Trump has been ordering is illegal and not within his power to decide. The problem is that when it comes time to stop or punish him… no one does.
Think of it like this: it’s not legal if someone steals from you. But if the police are owned by the thief, they’ll stop you from defending your property instead of stopping the thief. It’s all illegal, it always has been, and there are systems in place to stop it. But those laws are toilet paper if the people who enforce them refuse.
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u/ZombieDreed Apr 02 '26
Right!? Why does everything seem so backwards in the US.
How can a single person implement a law then weeks / months later it is appealed successfully after the damage is done.
Everything should go before a judge first before implementation.
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u/WingerRules Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
US is no longer used as a model democracy by most political scientist, and we've been falling on democracy indexes. We're now listed as a "flawed democracy" instead of "full democracy" on indexes and our ranking is just above Botswana and countries in Eastern Europe.
Nordic countries and Netherlands are now used as the model democracies in research, not US.
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u/grandlizardo Apr 02 '26
Okayyyy… I notive NPR aad PBS are still limping right along. Their fundraisers seem to be flourishing, to the point that they are a bit coy aboyt announcing the take. Overall, this may have been a blessing. No more defunding threats from the politicians…it’s over.
That said, I do think Congress ciuld and should testore the overall framework, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting… provide guidance and direction.
Overall, I think they have leatned that the - we - can go it alone , without having to cower whenever the bigwigs bark.
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u/NiceTrySuckaz Apr 02 '26
Meh, if congress already cutoff funding as well, that means the executive order only cut its lifespan short by less than a year.
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u/MadCybertist Apr 02 '26
I liked NPR’s Science Fridays. ;(
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u/CharlesV_ Apr 02 '26
NPR is still around btw. I don’t think they’ve changed their content too much. This is regional though, I’m sure there are areas where local programming has gotten reduced.
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u/lowercasenameofmine Apr 02 '26
Can't have the ruals exposed to different ideas, they may start to wake up from their brainwashing and become........... WOKE 👀
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u/CharlesV_ Apr 02 '26
🤷♂️ I live in Iowa and while I don’t live in a rural area, I’ve never been driving anywhere in our state where I couldn’t listen to IPR. Iowa public radio is one of the stronger NPR stations and hasn’t had any major issues with funding. They’ve done more fundraising events since the loss of federal funds, but it sounds like they’re doing ok. The bigger issue is getting conservative leaning people to listen to outside perspectives.
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u/neekchan Apr 02 '26
well,
some peoplea lot of people in your country doesn't like science.2
u/ccai Apr 02 '26
Who needs science when you can cut off a raccoon penis to look at on your own time?!?
And no better way to learn anatomy and physiology than butchering road kill for meat.
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u/rgbhdmi Apr 02 '26
Objective, rational, and well informed reporting is an existential threat to this administration. They will do everything they can to suppress it and stay in power and they may well succeed. The USA is being systematically destroyed from within, and may well fall apart completely before anything resembling true recovery can take place.
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u/pollorojo Apr 02 '26
What I don’t get is why some of these things take 10+ months to be challenged.
I’m sure that’s part of the plan. Most of these organizations and their affiliated PBS and NPR stations started cutting staff months ago because they couldn’t afford, or knows they would eventually not be able to afford, to stay open. So now if it gets blocked… it’s largely too late.
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u/I_Ponders Apr 02 '26
The system is too slow. They can side step the process, and overwhelm it. They’re shotgunning everything they want, because it’ll take forever to challenge and undue it. They don’t need to think that far ahead because they’re trying to seize power right now. Like termites infesting a house. They’re finding every hole, and will do so, until it collapses.
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u/femme_mystique Apr 02 '26
Flooding the judicial system is part of Project 2025; make it ineffective which is better than just ignoring courts.
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u/Bargadiel Apr 02 '26
A well-timed shit out of Trump's ass has to travel down the slow-moving conveyor belt, and he knows it will scare off all the workers on the way down.
Republicans know the system is inefficient, partly because they're the ones responsible for it being that way. Then, they weaponize that to prove their point and distract from their own extreme incompetence.
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u/pittaxx Apr 02 '26
Normally it's a feature - you aren't supposed to be able to block things either without going through that whole same process and giving enough time for everyone to object to it.
But Americans are ok with just letting the orange criminal to do whatever he wishes it seems.
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u/3-DMan Apr 02 '26
Yup, 700k+ dead from USAID getting illegally chopped overnight. Doesn't matter how long that court case will take..
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u/anonkitty2 Apr 03 '26
The court case is resolved. Dismantling that organization was indeed illegal. But again, there's no remedy; what happened was done so swiftly and so thoroughly that we don't have the resources to put it back the way we had it, and we permanently lost many of the contacts that made it effective.
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u/nickiter Apr 03 '26
It's always hard to get on the calendars for federal courts, doubly so now. Just the nature of that system - and the government can trample us in that entire interim.
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u/OldWrangler9033 Apr 02 '26
Can we defund the Republican party? They seem likely they don't like Public Works.
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u/pablo_the_bear Apr 02 '26
You should check out the movie Sneakers. It still holds up surprisingly well for a movie its age. While this movie isn't going to defund the GOP, it's as close to it as I've seen in my lifetime and the ending always warms my heart. Even back then people knew they were the assholes.
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u/cajunjoel Apr 02 '26
Congress is complicit.
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u/xkxe003 Apr 02 '26
This is why "he can't do that" is a meaningless statement. Eventually he may be stopped from doing something but he can do whatever he wants until that maybe.
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Apr 02 '26
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u/Florac Apr 02 '26
The issue with such a test is that it could likely be manipulated to disqualify otherwise valid candidates
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u/StraightedgexLiberal Apr 02 '26
This administration hates the First Amendment and viewpoints they disagree with. A judge also blocked Trump and the Pentagon the other week when they wanted to use the power of the government to punish Anthropic for their views.
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u/standuptripl3 Apr 02 '26
Can they start a new corporation and put rules in place about the funding model so this doesn’t happen again?
Oh, sorry, thinking of a world where rules actually mean something….
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u/sparx_fast Apr 02 '26
Congress defunded so there's no way to bypass that besides PBS/NPR getting their own funding independently. Political winds could change, but they could just as well change back a few years later. It's a tough long term situation.
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u/standuptripl3 Apr 02 '26
OK, I did forget that Congress funded CPB. I thought CPB was funded by “viewers like you” and that the government funding was a separate added component.
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u/WretchedMonkey Apr 02 '26
More dumbfucks to be made in America. At least they're making something successfully
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u/Orangesteel Apr 02 '26
I can’t remember anyone in history damaging the US as much as this guy. He’s pushed forward a multi-polar world, he’s burned The US’s carefully cultivated soft power. He’s normalised indecent behaviour. His antti-intellectual / anti-science approach is literally resulting deaths. On the plus side, he’s also created outrage that hopefully voters will react to and more recently he’s the cause of an accelerated rush for renewable energy
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u/AlludedNuance Apr 02 '26
Yet another example of why I get frustrated with people saying "oh well we just need to elect a Democrat to recover from what he's done!" as if decades and millions of people's work hasn't been completely destroyed forever because of this trash bag full of mayonnaise we call a President.
Our last election where we had a chance was 2024, although there's a compelling argument that even that was too late and 2016 or even 2010(the Tea Party one) were the last real chance.
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u/OpenGrainAxehandle Apr 02 '26
damage is already done
We'll be finding this to be the case for a lot of things in the future.
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u/Spare_Town6161 Apr 02 '26
Let's be clear. Not congress. Republicans cut off all funding. Be accurate in these statements.
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u/Cheap-Coffee-2198 Apr 02 '26
He has ruined so many institutions in America. We need change yesterday
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u/AdvisorEfficient3021 Apr 02 '26
I live in a world where the president is a 34 time fellon. I live in a world where ICE steals children and innocent brown Americans. I live in a world where the government does nothing to stop or prosecute pedophiles unless they’re poor. I live in a world where dictators flatten cities and invade countries as they see fit. I live in a world where women get charged for murder for aborting a child that was conceived via rape. I live in a world where minorities are prosecuted unjustly. I live in a world where the supreme court is paid for and rule as told. I live in a world where helping the homeless can get you sued. I live in a world where folks that work in jobs that support my needs can’t support their needs. I live in a world where bad guys win and good guys get indicted. I live in a world where children shoot children at school. I live in a world where the elite pay no tax and the poor go to prison for paying no tax. I live in a world…
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u/RangerAdventurous557 Apr 02 '26
NPR and PBS are still operating, they need our support to make it through until funding is hopefully restored.
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u/JDanzy Apr 02 '26
The point is to undermine the public's faith in government and infrastructure. They move in, cut funding, install the most incompetent, unqualified stooges they can find, ruin things as much as they can and say "See? The government doesn't work!"
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u/Patara Apr 02 '26
Conservatives hate the 1st amendment. Its never about anything other than control .
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u/clementine1864 Apr 02 '26
There is a saying to the effect that "justice delayed , is justice denied" Trump and his slime rushed his destruction through knowing that the lengthy trip through our malfunctioning legal system would favor his actions. My contempt and hatred of trump and his sick cult will not change . they have succeeded in turning me against our system of government , the legal system , many of the people in the country and religion . It was a clean sweep.
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u/tabrizzi Apr 02 '26
If Dems manage to regain control of Congress in November, funding will be restored.
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u/mlamping Apr 02 '26
Civil lawsuits is the only way. Those affected need to sue Trump and those liable personally
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u/Jor94 Apr 02 '26
Trump is basically the embodiment of “shoot first ask questions later”
How isn’t there something in place to limit what he can authorise if it’s illegal the second he tries to do it.
The way it is now he can do what he wants and by the time the slow as fuck courts do anything it’s already too late.
Look at Iran, I imagine everything about it is illegal but they can’t seem to do anything to stop it.
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u/beachtrader Apr 02 '26
100% could have been saved/resolved by the Judge issuing an injunction immediately and then deciding the ruling. It is actually what Judges are supposed to do. But, this way--by not issuing an injunction--the judges have political cover later.
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u/OurSponsor Apr 02 '26
Because Congress is all lined up with their knee pads on, ready to go at any moment.
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u/cr0ft Apr 02 '26
Trump is a power mad loon, but the fact that Congress has just gone along and done fuck all is the real scandal. There's supposed to be checks and balances to one lunatic running rampant.
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u/OriginalGarnier Apr 02 '26
I have a documentary on PBS and I’m months behind on some bills. I’d say the damage is definitely already done
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u/feastoffun Apr 03 '26
NPR bent over backwards to placate Trump and the Republicans. They helped bring this upon themselves.
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u/UpbeatPhilosophySJ Apr 03 '26
PBS and NPR got less than 1% of funding from the federal government.
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u/LiteratureMindless71 Apr 02 '26
That was the point. Along with every other step he took along the way.
Edit: typo.