After decades of promises, GOP finally defunds PBS and NPR



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.

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 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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Trump isn’t hiding a client list — he’s too busy saving the country



President Trump’s official repudiation of the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theory has caused considerable consternation and conflict on the right. But with that comes an opportunity to grow.

MAGA’s enduring fascination with this supermarket tabloid story represents one of the weaknesses of populism: namely, a tendency toward histrionic and grandiose speculation that leads to nowhere productive. To be blunt, the Epstein saga was a waste of bandwidth, and now that Trump and his team have ripped off the bandage, we can move on to bigger and more compelling issues like those on which Trump campaigned.

Neither Trump nor his Cabinet is at fault for failing to satiate those who were never going to accept anything less than a conclusion that Epstein was part of a grand conspiracy.

Suppressing the Epstein “client list” does not rank highly on the list of concerns of globalist elites, I wager, and it’s not the hill for MAGA to die on either.

For instance, the demographics of Western nations are obviously changing artificially — a change that appears to be politically motivated. Transnational elites care very much about keeping the Great Replacement moving along, and Trump is standing in their way. This is an example of a “conspiracy theory” that is both true and important. Thanks to Trump, we may finally have a chance of addressing it.

Another wild goose chase

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act delivers historic investments in immigration enforcement — progress that would have seemed impossible during his first term. That term, after all, was largely derailed by a different conspiracy theory peddled by the left: Russiagate.

Now, the same kind of baseless smears are coming from the right. Elon Musk, Trump’s newest rival, has insinuated — without evidence — that Trump was involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. On Musk’s platform, X, those accusations echo among conspiracy theorists and open anti-Semites (the term applies here), who claim, again without proof, that Epstein blackmailed Trump as part of an Israeli intelligence operation.

Some have twisted Trump’s curt response to an Epstein question during a Cabinet meeting into something sinister. But the simpler explanation is that he has more pressing matters. He’s negotiating trade deals, working to end two foreign wars, and responding to fresh political attacks over the Texas disaster.

Meanwhile, Democrats have eagerly seized on Musk’s smear. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who served on the January 6 committee, now demands that the administration “publicly release all documents in the Epstein files that mention or reference Donald Trump.”

Why should Trump spend a minute entertaining a baseless character assassination?

Foolishness doesn’t equal sinister

Attorney General Pam Bondi likely made a mistake when she pandered to the base with talk of a “client list.” But the blame doesn’t fall on Trump or his Cabinet for failing to satisfy people who were never going to accept anything short of a sweeping global conspiracy.

The belief that Epstein left behind a neatly organized archive of blackmail material implicating the world’s most powerful figures is a sensational claim — and sensational claims require actual evidence. Trump hasn’t released a “client list” because it almost certainly doesn’t exist. Yet in the minds of true believers, the absence of proof becomes proof of a cover-up.

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  Photo by Patrick van Katwijk/Getty Images

Epstein was an enigmatic and deeply corrupt figure. The public’s interest in his crimes and demand for justice are understandable. But the facts matter. His only known accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, is serving 20 years in federal prison. Epstein himself has been dead for six years.

That death came before COVID, before Trump’s supposed political downfall, and before his extraordinary comeback. Everything has changed since then. The right now holds real political power — thanks to Trump. But power only matters if we stay focused and use it.

Time to move on

Contrarian speculation isn’t virtuous on its own. Sometimes, the truth is just boring — and a serious movement should be willing to accept that. In our populist age, many reflexively reject anything that sounds conventional. But for a right-wing movement finally regaining strength, chasing ghosts is a good way to squander momentum.

It’s also unfair to Trump. Yes, he’s imperfect. But supporters often project their own agendas onto him, expecting him to fulfill missions he never promised to carry out. At no point during his campaign did Trump make the “client list” a top priority — and rightly so.

We’re fortunate to have him back in the White House. He’s using his time to govern, not indulge every conspiracy theory floating around online.

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