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Trump's Weakness Shows Through - The American Prospect
While you slept, Donald Trump was mad. So he fired off a late-night executive order that purports to block federal funding to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.
This is a sign of weakness.
NPR and PBS are perpetually under threat of losing funding when Republicans are in power, but they never pull the trigger because a critical mass of lawmakers in the party don’t actually want to vote against Big Bird. This time was supposed to be different. The GOP was determined to use a mechanism to vote down currently funded initiatives that the president wants to ditch. A rescission package avoids the Senate filibuster; the president simply sends a list of requested rescinded spending and it gets an up-or-down vote.
As of last month, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds NPR and PBS, was going to be on that list. The $9.3 billion rescission package was notably small, considering that DOGE has illegally blocked something like $430 billion in appropriated spending. It really only included foreign aid and the CPB, which gives NPR and PBS an annual contribution of about $1 billion. (Maybe 1 percent of the total budget for NPR and PBS comes from federal sources.) That’s because a rescission package cannot be amended; Trump tried a larger one in 2018 and the vote failed. With only one shot at making a list with sufficient political support, it got pared down to the bare essentials. And NPR/PBS funding was one of those essentials.
Trump was supposed to send over the rescission bill this week. Then it got delayed, and now the timeline is the end of this month. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have started to grumble about cutting even this tiny fraction of spending. They don’t actually want to be responsible for, you know, causing masses of child deaths in foreign countries, or even, apparently, revoking support for public media.
This is a sign of weakness.
NPR and PBS are perpetually under threat of losing funding when Republicans are in power, but they never pull the trigger because a critical mass of lawmakers in the party don’t actually want to vote against Big Bird. This time was supposed to be different. The GOP was determined to use a mechanism to vote down currently funded initiatives that the president wants to ditch. A rescission package avoids the Senate filibuster; the president simply sends a list of requested rescinded spending and it gets an up-or-down vote.
As of last month, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds NPR and PBS, was going to be on that list. The $9.3 billion rescission package was notably small, considering that DOGE has illegally blocked something like $430 billion in appropriated spending. It really only included foreign aid and the CPB, which gives NPR and PBS an annual contribution of about $1 billion. (Maybe 1 percent of the total budget for NPR and PBS comes from federal sources.) That’s because a rescission package cannot be amended; Trump tried a larger one in 2018 and the vote failed. With only one shot at making a list with sufficient political support, it got pared down to the bare essentials. And NPR/PBS funding was one of those essentials.
Trump was supposed to send over the rescission bill this week. Then it got delayed, and now the timeline is the end of this month. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have started to grumble about cutting even this tiny fraction of spending. They don’t actually want to be responsible for, you know, causing masses of child deaths in foreign countries, or even, apparently, revoking support for public media.
https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-05-02-trumps-weakness-shows-through-pbs-npr-funding/