President Donald Trump plans to ask Congress to rescind the funds it appropriated for public broadcasting, which is a good start in defunding NPR and PBS. The legislative branch must do that and then move to dissolve the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Rescission deals with the immediate. It applies instant pain to the public broadcasters because Congress would claw back money that it has already decided to appropriate. In this particular case, the administration is preparing to ask Congress to rescind $1.1 billion, according to published reports.
That would be around two years’ worth of appropriations, affecting fiscal years 2026 and 2027, as Congress “forward-funds” the Corporation for Public Broadcasting two years in advance. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting automatically got $535 million—the same as it got last year—in the last continuing resolution that Congress passed in March.
The rescission package will also include $8.3 billion in cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Once the administration submits the request, which it hasn’t done yet, Congress has 45 days to approve or reject the request. Sources have said the administration feels it has the votes to pass the package.
The New York Post reported Monday that Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought drafted a memo outlining the cuts. Vought explained that public broadcasters will lose their funding because of their “lengthy history of anti-conservative bias.” I haven’t seen the memo, but I have been reliably told that the report and Vought’s description of public media’s leftist bias are accurate.
As I testified to the House’s Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency on March 26, NPR and PBS have refused to observe the simple code of decency that dictates that when taxpayers of all persuasions are coerced to pay for you, you owe them impartiality.
“NPR, PBS, and the other state broadcasters have, however, simply refused to abide by this simple code,” I told Congress. “They have been coddled by allies in Congress into feeling immune to it. They have shown scorn for conservative views on a consistent basis and have done so safely in the knowledge that their friends in Congress, of both parties, will save their bacon year in and year out. And indeed, this has so far always been the case since they were created.”
I and 20 other Republicans also sent Trump a joint letter requesting the rescission package. Other signatories came from high-profile conservative organizations, such as the Media Research Center, which organized the effort, the Claremont Institute, the American Principles Project, the Heartland Institute, and the Conservative Partnership Institute.
In it, we told the president that we had heard that a rescission package was coming and urged him “to include the complete defunding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and its affiliates, PBS and NPR.”
“NPR’s and PBS’s demonstrable, documented bias further erodes the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s credibility. NPR’s audience overwhelmingly identifies as liberal, reinforcing the reality that public broadcasting is not a neutral service but a taxpayer-funded ideological platform. Americans should not be forced to finance a network that caters to one side of the political spectrum,” we added.
A copy of the letter was also sent to Vought.
What makes us think that there is a chance this time that NPR and PBS can be defunded, given that every Republican president since Lyndon B. Johnson created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting tried and failed?
Things are different now for many reasons, one being that Trump and Elon Musk are busy dismantling the permanent bureaucracy, and NPR and PBS, as state broadcasters, are the emitters of the views of this Acela Corridor.
Both men also believe PBS and NPR do not deserve one more penny of taxpayer money.
But ultimately, two things may have sealed the public broadcasters’ fate, and they have to do with NPR. The first was an essay by an NPR whistleblower, Uri Berliner, which was published in the Free Press on April 4, 2024. Berliner, a 25-year NPR veteran, exposed the rot inside the organization.
Berliner revealed that NPR’s audience has become completely lopsided, at only 11% Republican; that at the NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., there are 87 registered Democrats and zero Republicans; and that in every story, from the Russia collusion hoax to Hunter Biden’s laptop to the origins of COVID-19, NPR took the far-left side and ignored the conservative perspective.
Then, there was the appointment of Katherine Maher as NPR CEO and president just about a year ago. As people dug through her social media posts, they found out she was so woke that wags such as Chris Rufo riffed that she was produced by artificial intelligence.
Maher sees the First Amendment as “the No. 1 challenge” to censoring news she disagrees with (“disinformation” is how she would refer to it). She also said, “Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”
As for Trump, Maher has called him a “deranged, racist sociopath.”
Maher could be the reason why this time is different, and the rescission may just open the floodgates.
