President Donald Trump is among the Republicans who have long sought to terminate federal funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service, a pair of outfits whose unmistakable ideological bias and imbalanced coverage at taxpayers' expense have rankled conservatives. The call to defund the liberal networks goes back at least as far as the Nixon administration. 

On May 1, Trump ordered the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to cut off the liberal propaganda networks' direct and indirect funding, noting both that "Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage" and that "no media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies."

The president's order was, however, vulnerable to legal challenges — especially since Congress holds the power of the purse.

To ensure the success and permanence of this defunding effort, the White House proposed that Congress cancel funding to public broadcasting for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. In addition to the proposed $1.1 billion in cuts to the CPB, the White House also requested that lawmakers cancel over $8 billion to various leftist projects disguised as foreign aid programs.

'Washington has a spending problem, and we have to start making cuts.'

House Republicans ultimately obliged the president, delivering most of his desired cuts late Thursday night. None of the Democrats' amendments were adopted. A promise to voters decades in the making was finally delivered.

In the run-up to the vote in the House of Representatives, an Office of Management and Budget official seized on the historic nature of the cuts. In a statement to Blaze News, the official said, "Conservatives have been calling to defund NPR and PBS for decades. President Trump delivered in six months. Not only that, this package cuts billions in wasteful foreign aid that has been spent on projects including $4 million for 'sedentary migrants' in Colombia, $643,000 for LGBTQI+ programs in the Western Balkans, $833,000 for 'transgender people, sex workers, and their clients and sexual networks' in Nepal, and many more."

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"The Trump administration is committed to putting America first and restoring fiscal sanity," continued the OMB official. "This recissions package is a huge step in the right direction."

Russ Vought, director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, told Steve Bannon's "War Room" on Thursday that the pending passage of the rescissions package and the defunding of the CPB in particular would be a "historic victory." After all, it is the first successful presidentially proposed rescissions package since fiscal year 1999.

RELATED: Vance casts tiebreaking vote to advance DOGE cuts after Republicans defy Trump

 Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images

The U.S. Senate voted 51-48 on Trump's requested cuts in an early Thursday-morning vote just hours after Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) emphasized that "reining in waste, fraud, and abuse in the federal government is a priority shared by President Trump and by Senate Republicans."

Thune noted further when teeing up the rescissions package that it was a "small but important step toward fiscal sanity that we all should be able to agree is long overdue."

When asked ahead of the Senate vote whether lawmakers might water down the DOGE cuts, Florida Rep. Greg Steube (R) expressed hope to Blaze Media that Republicans would see it through, stressing that "Washington has a spending problem, and we have to start making cuts."

'Conservatives have been calling to defund NPR and PBS for decades. President Trump delivered in six months.'

Although the House already voted in favor of the cuts in a 214-212 vote last month — where Republican Reps. Mark Amodei of Nevada, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, and Mike Turner of Ohio voted in opposition — the small changes made in the Senate still needed to be voted on by the House.

The package passed the House again by a narrow margin late Thursday night, this time of 216-213. Once again, both Fitzpatrick and Turner voted against passing the cuts.

Trump pledged to sign the package into law at the White House on Friday afternoon. "Congratulations to our GREAT REPUBLICANS for being able to accomplish so much, a record, in so short a period of time," he posted to Truth Social Friday morning.

RELATED: Sparing taxpayers from funding leftist propaganda

  NPR CEO Katherine Maher. Photo by PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP via Getty Images

Trump's success — which has enraged Democratic lawmakers and NGOs — will have a major impact at NPR and PBS.

A spokesman for PBS, which has over 330 member television stations, indicated earlier this year that the organization receives 16% of its funding directly from the federal government each year.

While NPR claims that less than 1% of its annual operating budget comes in the form of grants directly from the CPB and other federal sources, the programming fees paid by CPB-funded public radio stations to NPR have been one of its primary sources of revenue.

Blaze News previously reported that consolidated financial statements show that the organization secured over $96.1 million in "core and other programming fees" in 2023, $93.2 million in 2022, $90.4 million in 2021, and $92.5 million in 2020.

That tap has now been turned off for at least two years.

Katherine Maher, president and CEO of NPR, said in a statement obtained by Blaze News after the Senate vote, "Public radio is a lifeline, connecting rural communities to the rest of the nation and providing lifesaving emergency broadcasting and weather alerts. It cannot be replaced, so it is essential that its funding be sustained."

Blaze News has reached out to PBS for comment.

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