Katherine Maher (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

NPR will not negotiate with President Donald Trump, CEO Katherine Maher said Tuesday as the network sued Trump over his executive order stripping NPR of all federal funding.

"As an independent media organization, we wouldn't go ahead and have that conversation because that would be negotiating on editorial principle," Maher told journalist Oliver Darcy.

Hours earlier, NPR and three of its member stations filed a lawsuit against the president over his May 1 executive order, accusing Trump of violating their First Amendment rights and seeking to "punish NPR for the content of news and other programming the President dislikes." Trump's order instructs the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cut off all direct federal funding for NPR and PBS—America's two largest public broadcasters—to the "maximum extent allowed by law" and "decline to provide future funding."

Maher acknowledged during a March congressional hearing that NPR poorly covered the Hunter Biden laptop and the origins of COVID-19. She provoked laughter when she said she has "never seen … political bias" at NPR.

NPR and PBS have long faced public scrutiny over left-wing political bias in their coverage—even as the networks have received federal funding for decades. In an essay explaining the reasons for his resignation, former NPR senior editor Uri Berliner blasted "devastating" bias at the broadcaster and singled out Maher's "divisive views." Among other accusations, Berliner found that 87 Democrats fill NPR editorial positions in the Washington, D.C., area, compared with 0 Republicans.

In the 2025 fiscal year alone, NPR and PBS received around $535 million from the federal government.

Maher has her own history of controversy. In May 2020, she tweeted that Trump is a "deranged racist sociopath." Later that year, Maher dismissed widespread looting and property damage during the Black Lives Matter riots, saying it was "hard to be mad" about the destruction.

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