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The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced on Friday that it will wind down its operations due to the successful Republican effort to defund local PBS and NPR stations across the country.
The announcement came just over a week after President Donald Trump enacted a rescissions bill clawing back congressionally approved federal funds for public media and foreign aid. Of the $9 billion in canceled funds, $1.1 billion was earmarked for the corporation for the next two years.
“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison said in a statement. “CPB remains committed to fulfilling its fiduciary responsibilities and supporting our partners through this transition with transparency and care.”
Officials at the organization, which was founded more than 60 years ago, say they are focused on helping local stations figure out how to cope with sudden budget shortfalls. Harrison has warned that some stations, particularly in rural areas, will have to shut down without federal support.
Listen to Mister Rogers’ defend public media funding in 1969.
Most larger stations have numerous other funding sources, including viewer and listener donations, to soften the blow dealt by Congress. Still, public media executives have warned that the interconnected system will be weakened in various ways without federal funding as a foundation.
Most of the corporation’s roughly 100 staff positions will be eliminated when the money runs out on September 30. The CPB will maintain a small transition team through January to guarantee “a responsible and orderly closeout of operations,” it said in a statement.
The shuttering is a political victory for Trump, who tried several different methods to defund public broadcasting this year. At one point, he tried to fire three of the corporation’s board members, even though he had no authority to do so under the law that created the corporation in 1967.
The corporation went to court to defend its board members, but on Friday, it filed a voluntary dismissal of its lawsuit, in effect acknowledging that Trump has prevailed.
“REPUBLICANS HAVE TRIED DOING THIS FOR 40 YEARS, AND FAILED….BUT NO MORE,” Trump wrote on Truth Social after the rescission bill he pushed was approved by both the GOP-controlled House and Senate.
Even after Trump signed the bill into law, some public media advocates held out hope that federal funding could be restored through the normal appropriations process in Congress. Senators advanced a draft bill without any such funding on Thursday, however, signaling that such a plot twist was exceedingly unlikely.
For Trump and other Republican lawmakers, eliminating the corporation is a successful stand against liberal bias, which they allege is a rampant problem at both NPR and PBS.
For public media advocates, it’s the end of a noncommercial TV and radio era, taking the federal government out of the funding equation altogether.
“The end of CPB is the direct result of the deep and corrupt failure of Congress and the Trump administration to invest in informing the American public,” Craig Aaron, co-CEO of the progressive media reform group Free Press, said in a statement. “They have trashed decades of democracy-building work and will deny many journalists, artists, educators and creators the opportunity to be heard.”
Aaron expressed hope that publicly-funded media can be reinvented as “a bulwark against authoritarianism that meets the civic needs of all our communities.”
Some station leaders have similarly described this moment as an opportunity to rebuild with more local-level support. GBH, the public media powerhouse in Boston, put up a sign outside its headquarters last month that read “Local. Trusted. Defunded.”
“We’re not backing down” despite the federal funding loss, GBH said in a fundraising push, “but we can’t do it without you. Donate now to keep public media strong and independent.”
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