Labor & Employment Law Daily Wrap Up, LITIGATION NEWS, TRENDS—Corporation for Public Broadcasting and board members seek judicial declaration that Trump’s terminations are of no legal effect, (May 1, 2025)

By Brandi O. Brown, J.D.

They allege that an April 28, 2025, email purporting to terminate the positions of three Board members is without effect because CPB is a private corporation created by Congress.

In a lawsuit brought in D.C. federal court by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), including the entirety of its Board of Directors and three individual Board members, the entity is challenging the Trump administration’s attempt to sack those three Board members via an email received on April 28, 2025. CPB seeks a judicial declaration that the email purporting to terminate the positions is of no legal effect because the President has no power to remove or terminate the CPB’s Board members.

CPB is a District of Columbia nonprofit corporation created by Congress in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, 47 U.S.C. § 396, which, along with well-established legal precedent, they allege, establishes that the CPB was created by Congress to expressly be “a private corporation [to] be created to facilitate the development of public telecommunications and to afford maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.”

Statutorily insulated. They allege that, in order to ensure that it was “insulated from partisan governmental interference and control” and autonomous, Congress expressly provided various protections for CPB, including that: (1) is not a federal agency subject to the President’s authority, but rather a private corporation; (2) its Board members are not officers of the United States, and thus are not within the removal provisions of Article II of the Constitution; (3) its Board members cannot be affected, controlled, or disturbed by the actions of the government; (4) its Board members forfeit their membership in only one scenario, which is not present here; and (5) the Act omits the typical statutory provision when creating a federal agency that the Board members serve at the pleasure of the President.

Courts have recognized this. Moreover, the courts have also excluded CPB from federal agency consideration. This includes the D.C. Circuit, which has explicitly recognized CPB’s independence and non-government-entity status, and the U.S. Supreme Court, which “even recognized CPB’s independent status when it relied on the statutory independence of CPB to invalidate a prior version of 47 U.S.C. § 399[.]”

They seek a declaration that the email purporting to remove the three named Board members is of no legal effect and an order that the defendants “take no actions to give effect to the purported email or otherwise seek to interfere with or control the governance and operations of the CPB.”

The case is No. 1:25-cv-01305.

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