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White House asks Congress to formally defund NPR, PBS, USAID, claw back $9 billion

April 15, 2025 | | Print Article

The Trump White House intends to ask Congress to formally defund publicly funded left-wing propaganda networks like NPR and PBS.

The plan calls for handing over to congressional Republicans a spending cuts “rescission” package totaling $9 billion, including $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which oversees public networks like NPR and PBS.

The rest of the cuts would target the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and agencies like the U.S. Institute of Peace.

Once Republicans receive the package, they’ll have 45 days to either pass it in both the House and Senate or reject it.

“For years, American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news,'” the White House said in a press release. “As President Trump has stated, taxpayer funding of NPR’s and PBS’s biased content is a waste.”

The press release continued by listing dozens of “examples of the trash that passes for ‘news’ at NPR and PBS.”

The release noted, for example, that last year NPR ran a Valentine’s Day special about “queer animals,” including allegedly “nonbinary” deer. That same year, PBS produced a pro-reparations documentary.

Two years earlier, NPR ran a story about the “whole community of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts” and “trans-ceratops.” A year earlier in 2021, PBS ran a children’s special featuring a drag queen.

The press release also pointed to NPR and PBS’ notoriously left-wing bias, demonstrated most acutely by NPR’s refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story in late 2020:

Over at PBS, meanwhile, the network has fear-mongered about the supposed “far-right” over 150 times but barely ever said anything about the increasingly volatile and dangerous “far-left.”

Similarly, last year PBS’s coverage of the Republican National Convention was 72 percent negative, according to a study, whereas its coverage of the Democratic National Convention was 88 percent positive.

“The bottom line here: NPR and PBS only have themselves to blame,” Mike Gonzalez of the Heritage Foundation told the New York Times in a statement. “For the last 50 years, every Republican president has tried to defund them or reform them.”

All this comes weeks after a House Subcommittee on Delivering on Government Efficiency hearing during which Republicans grilled NPR CEO Katherine Maher and PBS CEO Paula Kerger about their blatant bias.

“The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is using taxpayer dollars to actively suppress the truth, suppress diverse viewpoints, and produce some of the most outlandish, ludicrous content,” committee chair Marjorie Taylor Greene said during the hearing.

“After listening to what we’ve heard today, we will be calling for the complete and total defund and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” she added.

Listen:

“NPR and PBS have increasingly become radical left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy, white urban liberals and progressives who generally look down on and judge rural America,” she continued.

The only good news for public radio networks like NPR and PBS is that their being defunded would probably lead to an outpouring of charity.

“Cutting off federal funding would galvanize public radio supporters, leading to a sudden surge in donations to stations across the United States,” the Times notes, citing an internal NPR document.

Vivek Saxena
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