Are Public Broadcasters About To Lose Their Subsidies?
Will the federal government cut off its subsidies to public broadcasters this year? The New York Post reports that the White House’s “rescissions” plan will include a request that Congress withdraw $1.1 billion already appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). That wouldn’t be absolutely everything Washington spends on public media—The New York Times notes that the administration doesn’t plan to claw back some money being spent on emergency communications—but it’s close.
If you’ve been following the politics of public broadcasting for a while, this will sound familiar. There is a long history of Republicans calling for an end to such subsidies, but they have never actually done the deed. They often don’t even reduce the money that goes to NPR, PBS, and the rest—and when they do, it’s just a short time before the broadcasters’ budget is higher than it was before. Instead, the usual effect of these standoffs is for the networks to appease the GOP by hiring some conservatives and/or getting rid of some programming conservatives don’t like. That pattern is so well-established that I’ve come to see those hirings and firings as the point: Republican leaders use the threat of cutting the broadcasters loose as a way to keep them in line. President Donald Trump certainly hasn’t been shy about using federal purse strings to bend institutions to his will, so it’s not hard to assume that he’s doing the same thing here that he’s been doing with, say, universities.
But the dynamics may be different this time. There is a chance—a chance—that this year the CPB’s subsidies will actually stop.
There are two reasons to think that. One is the drama unfolding at the federal government’s other big radio/TV operation, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which funds the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the like. Trump tried to remake that empire in his own image during his first ter
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