How the Trump Administration Is Trying to Defund Public Media

The U.S. public-media system is facing its most serious threats yet.

After chairing a Department of Government Efficiency subcommittee hearing in March called “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R–Georgia) co-sponsored legislation to completely defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a move backed by President Trump. Earlier this year, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr called for a federal investigation into the underwriting arrangements that NPR and PBS use, claiming they’re disguising commercial advertising.

A coordinated attempt to defund public media

This is an attempt to dismantle public media and push everything into corporate hands. It is straight out of the Project 2025 playbook, a right-wing blueprint for the Trump administration. Project 2025 lays out plans to entirely eliminate the CPB and turn the FCC into a partisan weapon. This is all about using government power to threaten, punish and defund media outlets that don’t fall in line with the MAGA agenda.

All of this is part of a larger campaign to control the flow of information. Right-wing lawmakers and operatives want to punish independent journalism while elevating platforms their allies own. That includes Elon Musk’s X, where government disinformation and hate speech thrive unchecked.

This is a fight over who gets to shape the media agenda about government policy and whether the American public still believes in journalism that serves the people — not private interests, party agendas or billionaires.

Public media’s most vocal opponents want to rewrite the story of how we got here. But the facts tell a different story. And that story shows how their plans will deny the American public free, accessible and nonpartisan journalism.

Here’s what you should know about this debate and why the context about what CPB funds and why it was established matters.

What is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and what does it fund?

During the congressional hearing featuring the heads of NPR and PBS, it was clear that many Republican lawmakers don’t know how the CPB, NPR and PBS actually work — and what federal funds provide to local stations. 

CPB is an independent nonprofit organization established after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. The legislation was a result of the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television’s report “Public Television: A Program for Action,” which recommended “that Congress act promptly to authorize and to establish a federally chartered, nonprofit, nongovernmental corporation, to be known as the ‘Corporation for Public Television.’”

The Public Broadcasting Act was part of President Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative, which included a series of laws passed to provide more resources for education, to fight poverty and expand civil rights. This law requires CPB to fund the development of content that addresses the needs of underserved audiences, especially children and communities of color. To that end, CPB funds the operations of more than 1,500 local public and community radio stations across the United States.

CPB does not itself produce programming and does not own, operate or control any public-broadcasting stations. CPB, PBS and NPR are independent of each other and of local public television and radio stations. CPB provides funding to these networks, and the networks provide nationally syndicated content to supplement the local content of its member stations.

CPB also funds infrastructure that delivers critical content and emergency alerts to local stations, which share this lifesaving information with their audiences and public-safety partners. Through PBS WARN, public-television stations serve as the fail-safe alternate-distribution path for the nationwide Wireless Emergency Alert (WEA) system.

Separately, NPR and the Public Radio Satellite System (PRSS) enable presidential-level broadcast alerts from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to reach everyone in the United States within minutes of a national crisis. The PRSS’ MetaPub service enables about 12 percent of local public-radio stations to issue text and image alerts to mobile phones, “connected car” smart dashboards, HD radios and online streams. In many rural areas, CPB-funded public-media stations are the only source of emergency-alert system announcements.

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 also established a vision for media that would be used for “instructional, educational, and cultural purposes” — and encouraged “the development of programming that involves creative risks and that addresses the needs of unserved and underserved audiences, particularly children and minorities.”

One of CPB’s most significant contributions to the media landscape is funding children’s educational programming, which reaches 99 percent of U.S. households. Educational shows like Sesame Street, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, Alma’s Way and Kid’s Corner are impactful shows found to have positive outcomes on children’s learning and development. Initiatives like CPB’s Ready to Learn fund the development of educational television and digital media targeted at preschool and early elementary-school children and their families, including those from communities experiencing poverty. These educational media programs are vital to improving school readiness and developing emotional intelligence skills in children.

Public media is the country’s largest provider of nonprofit local news and rural journalism 

Public media represents the largest nonprofit news system in the United States, with more than 4,300 journalists based at local stations. Thousands more journalists, on-air hosts and producers are part of noncommercial educational community-radio stations that are organized through American Public Media, the Pacifica network or independent local stations.

These journalists and news producers provide a free, accessible alternative to paywalled corporate print journalism and mainstream commercial-broadcast media. There are still hundreds of counties that either lack or have limited access to broadband, and with literacy gaps and the digital divide affecting millions of people, radio and TV provide a lifeline that is accessible to people of all reading and technology levels. 

According to research from the Local News Initiative, more than 55 million Americans have little-to-no access to a local-news source. In fact, more than 200 counties across the country, mostly in rural areas, have no local-news sources. This stems from decades of media consolidation that has led to the loss of thousands of local newspapers and independent radio and TV stations.

In 2023, Protect My Public Media — an action network of people working to protect local public television and radio stations — conducted a study with NPR member stations to determine how they would fare if the federal government cut their funding. The study found that stations “serving rural, island, and tribal communities would face the most severe consequences. Twenty-six stations confirmed that they would be forced off-air, and 23 more stations would need to reduce their coverage areas, cutting off rural listeners due to the high costs of reaching these communities.”

The study concluded that as many as 46.1 million Americans residing in rural areas could lose access to their only source of local journalism. Rural stations depend more on CPB funds than larger stations, which receive grants, have larger membership bases, and bring in more money from sponsorships and underwriting. 

Defunding CPB — or launching frivolous investigations of public-media stations — will not solve the local-news crisis. The United States invests much less in public media than comparable countries. To expand access to local news, we should invest much more in public and community media infrastructure.  

Why is the CPB on the chopping block every year? 

Republicans claim that public media has a liberal bias because it provides news content that is critical or even oppositional to billionaires, powerful special interests and elected officials of all political affiliations. Now that the GOP has control of both the White House and Congress, its long-held obsession with defunding public media could become a reality.

Project 2025 has an entire section dedicated to defunding CPB. The author, Mike Gonzalez, is a fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation who served as one of the witnesses at the DOGE hearing. In his Project 2025 chapter, Gonzalez calls for the FCC to take away the noncommercial educational (NCE) licenses of public and community stations because he claims — without evidence — that more than 1,500 NCE stations are no longer meeting their educational mission and are airing commercials on their stations. 

Such a claim is misleading. Individual stations that are the FCC operators of NCE licenses are responsible for programming ads on local airwaves, not national networks like NPR and PBS. The FCC does not directly regulate NPR or PBS. These threats are part of a larger scheme to portray public media in a negative light — and dismantle the infrastructure that supports it.

Why should we invest in public media?

The United States spends less than $2 per person each year on public media — a ridiculously low number compared to other democracies. Chronic underfunding has forced public stations to seek corporate underwriting to survive — which opponents then use to undermine their credibility.

That’s why Free Press Action has been a fierce defender of public and community media for more than 20 years. We’ve advocated for public media in Congress, written extensively about the benefits of public funding for journalism and participated in campaigns with other media-justice organizations to protect public media.

The solution isn’t to gut public media. It’s to fund it properly.

Public media delivers an enormous return on that small investment. Federal dollars support local journalism, emergency alerts, educational programming and cultural coverage that reach millions of people, especially in places where other media outlets have disappeared or been taken over by private equity firms, hedge funds and billionaires. From trusted election coverage to classroom resources, public media helps people make sense of the world around them. It informs entire communities, connecting people to one another and to public life. A more informed public leads to greater civic engagement and a stronger democracy. This is what’s at stake if public media is no longer able to carry out its mission.

Public media consistently ranks as one of the most trusted news sources in the country. At a time when local newsrooms are shrinking or shutting down, public radio and television stations are still covering city council meetings, school boards and statehouses. They are filling gaps no one else will — and making the content free and accessible to all.

That’s not to say that there’s no room for improvement: NPR and PBS stations often fail to meet the information needs of communities of color, Indigenous communities and non-English-speaking immigrants. There is still a lot of work to do to increase the amount of locally based content, diversify their staff and audience, and engage more with underserved communities. But these stations’ ability to deliver programming and services becomes that much more difficult when we take away or reduce their funding.

Federal funding makes local fundraising possible. It gives stations the stability they need to build relationships with listeners, attract donors and plan for the long term. Without that base, everything else becomes harder to sustain.

And the reality is that the current level of funding has never been enough. We should be doubling — if not tripling — funding for public media in the United States to be on par with other developed countries and make bigger public investments to address the local-news crisis. We should make public media more accessible, expand local news coverage and develop more robust emergency communications infrastructure, especially given the increasing number of climate disasters in the United States.

This is the time to invest in public media, not tear it down.

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