CNN
—
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to end federal funding for America’s two biggest public broadcasters, which have faced a series of attacks from the White House and Republican lawmakers accusing them of biased reporting.
The order instructs the CPB’s board to terminate direct funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service to the “maximum extent allowed by law and shall decline to provide future funding.” It also orders the board to take steps to “minimize or eliminate” indirect funding to NPR and PBS.
The executive order also directs Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to investigate NPR and PBS for possible employment discrimination, and it instructs the heads of all other federal agencies to “identify and terminate” any direct or indirect funding of the media organizations, as allowed by the law.
The order follows previous attacks on the public broadcasters by the Trump administration and prominent Republicans.
Each year, the CPB disperses $535 million in taxpayer funds to public radio and TV stations nationwide, stations provide free and universal access to educational shows, emergency alerts and a wide array of news and cultural content.
This includes stations with PBS and NPR, as well as some lesser-known public media outlets. The White House has said it will soon ask Congress to claw back the money already allocated for CPB over the next two years.
Without the federal funding, some local stations could be forced off the air, especially in rural areas that are Republican strongholds. In many cases “these are the last locally owned broadcasters in these communities,” Ed Ulman, the CEO of Alaska Public Media, told CNN last month.
Earlier this week, the CPB filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration after three of its five board members were terminated by email. The three board members who received the emails — Laura G. Ross, Thomas E. Rothman and Diane Kaplan — were appointed by then-President Joe Biden in 2022 (Ross was originally appointed by Trump in 2018 and then reappointed by Biden).
Congress specifically set up the corporation as a private entity “to afford maximum protection from extraneous interference and control,” according to a law passed in 1967. The legislation expressly forbids the government from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting.”
