Judges Cite Presidential Attacks on Press in Rulings Against Government

Federal judges have turned President Trump's public attacks on the press into legal liability, citing his administration's hostility toward specific news organizations as evidence of unconstitutional retaliation in at least three separate court rulings that went against the government.

The most recent and sweeping of those rulings came on March 31, 2026, when U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss found that Executive Order 14290, which Trump issued in May 2025, was unconstitutional on its face. Moss ruled that the order directing all federal agencies to "cut off any and all funding" to NPR and PBS violated the First Amendment's prohibition on viewpoint discrimination and retaliation.

The judge noted that the order's own title, "Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media," and the president's accompanying rhetoric left little legal ambiguity about the government's motivations. "The message is clear: NPR and PBS need not apply for any federal benefit because the President disapproves of their 'left wing' coverage of the news," Moss wrote. "It is difficult to conceive of clearer evidence that a government action is targeted at viewpoints that the President does not like and seeks to squelch," he added.

The ruling permanently enjoined the government from implementing or enforcing the executive order. Moss, nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama, found that the order "singles out two speakers and, on the basis of their speech, bars them from all federally funded programs," a standard the judge said had never been upheld by any court in the country's history. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting had already shut down in January 2026 after 58 years following the funding cuts, meaning the ruling could not fully reverse the damage already done to the public broadcasting infrastructure.

In a separate case involving a Trump appointee's actions against another federally funded media institution, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that Kari Lake had not been properly appointed as acting CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees the Voice of America. Lake had issued mass layoff notices in June 2025 to 639 employees of the agency, which also directs money for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. Lamberth ordered more than 1,000 full-time journalists and staff to return to work.

The pattern across the cases reflects a broader legal strategy by opponents of the administration: using the president's own words against him in court. Federal judges have granted media organizations many early victories in their lawsuits against Trump, though it remains too early to tell what the final outcomes of those cases will be. The U.S. currently ranks 57th out of 180 countries on the World Press Freedom Index, the lowest ranking the country has received for its domestic press freedom conditions since Reporters Without Borders first started compiling the index in 2002.

The White House dismissed the Moss ruling as legally baseless. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson called it "a ridiculous ruling by an activist judge attempting to undermine the law," adding that "NPR and PBS have no right to receive taxpayer funds, and Congress already voted to defund them."

The administration has signaled it will appeal, but for now judges are finding that when a president publicly calls broadcasters ideologically corrupt and then strips their funding, the Constitution treats the sequence as evidence, not coincidence.