Court Denies CPB Restraining Order Against FEMA Funding Freeze

The Federal Emergency Management Agency denied that it has frozen reimbursement payments to public broadcasters in response to CPB’s request that the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (docket 1:25-cv-00740-TJK) intervene (see 2503140060). A docket entry Monday said that the court had denied CPB's motion for a temporary restraining order. “The Agency is taking no such action -- there has been no withholding of funding,” said FEMA in a filing opposing CPB's request Saturday. “Rather, the Agency has modified its process for the review of payment requests.” The “hold toggle” lets the agency manually review reimbursement requests before sending them out, FEMA said. “The Agency will process payment requests and approve them for payment as appropriate, simply with an added level of internal controls to ensure that payment requests are reviewed prior to payment being released.”

CPB disagreed in its response filing Sunday. FEMA’s argument that blocking funds with a hold toggle is materially different from pausing or freezing them is “somewhere between nonsensical and Orwellian and, unsurprisingly, happens also to be belied by the plain meanings of the words,” CPB said.

CBP and 20 public broadcast stations have had payments withheld for nearly 30 days, the group said.

Implementing a manual review process three years into the Next Generation Warning System grant program is arbitrary because FEMA “has been intimately involved every step of the way in terms of the specific sites receiving new emergency broadcast equipment, creating a FEMA pre-approved equipment list, receiving monthly and quarterly reports on the expenses incurred and the progress of the grant,” CPB said. The hold “is a transparent effort to continue the unlawful freeze on the draw-down of appropriated funds by arbitrarily denying reimbursement requests using unidentified criteria.”