‘A Statement That Probably Needed to Be Made’

Three Colorado stations signed on to a lawsuit that challenged the Trump administration’s defunding of NPR and PBS. It’s too late to recover lost funds, but their court victory sets an important precedent.

Fifty years ago, the radio station that would become KSUT launched from a small room in Durango, Colorado. It had temperature problems and no ventilation. The plan was to provide information, alerts, and programming for the Southern Ute Indian Tribe; KSUT, now an NPR affiliate serving the whole Four Corners region, is one of only eight tribal radio stations in the country. Last week, KSUT emerged victorious—along with two Colorado stations, in Denver and Aspen; NPR more broadly; and PBS—in a suit against the Trump administration that I covered earlier this year. “Everyone is just so proud of KSUT for taking this stand,” Tami Graham, KSUT’s station manager, told me. “It’s quite risky for us, as you know, to do this for fear of retaliation from this administration.”

The lawsuit, which brought KSUT, Colorado Public Radio, and Aspen Public Radio as coplaintiffs with NPR and PBS, stemmed from Executive Order 14290: “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” which Donald Trump signed in early May of 2025. The order mandated that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) stop providing money to NPR and PBS; as a result, in January, CPB was formally dissolved. A fact sheet from the administration lambasted NPR for saying, in one program, that “banana slugs are hermaphrodites”; this, along with other features, illustrated “partisan capture.” Questions were raised, Thomas Evans, NPR’s editor in chief, recalled, about whether the order would “bar member stations from carrying things like Morning Edition. But now that that’s been knocked down, there’s no question about us having a continued relationship.”