Why it's time to pull the plug on NPR and PBS
In just a few short months, President Donald Trump has delivered like no president before, leading a seismic governmental realignment back toward accountability, efficiency and America First values. He's carrying out the agenda Americans elected him to do in November.
In Congress, we have a duty to act with urgency and resolve to provide the legislative backup that the commander in chief needs.
On the House Oversight DOGE Subcommittee, where we are working to identify and eliminate waste, fraud and abuse of federal funds, I am laser-focused on rescinding every dollar of federal funding for state-sponsored media. This is the Land of the Free, not China, Russia or North Korea, and yet over $535 million in taxpayer dollars keep National Public Radio (NPR) and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) spewing leftist activism and labeling it journalism.
In a recent DOGE hearing, I confronted NPR's CEO Katherine Maher on her radical past. What the American people saw was stunning.
Under oath, the head of NPR couldn't explain away her old incriminating tweets – some citing her support for racial reparations, racism against White men and downplaying the violence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. Her record reads like a Marxist playbook. Her answers were evasive, her tone defiant and her priorities decidedly un-American.
When pressed about double standards in NPR's news coverage, she dodged accountability, insisting NPR is fair and balanced – while the facts tell a different story. Under the misnomer of being "news," NPR has blasted fear of "fatness," defended censorship, platformed disinformation and actively blacklisted dissenting conservative voices.
It's no wonder that Maher was chosen to spearhead NPR's agenda of relentless bias, as scathingly exposed by former NPR editor Uri Berliner.
Let's be clear: NPR and the federally funded Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) aren't neutral media institutions. They are propaganda machines forcing a worldview that sneers at middle America, celebrates fringe ideology and defends the very institutions that have failed everyday Americans. PBS has repeatedly pushed critical race theory and gender ideology in the classroom, exposing minors to salacious drag queen programming – all on the taxpayer's dime.
The days of using our tax dollars on state-sponsored propaganda are coming to a harsh end.
I applaud and thank President Trump for his leadership on this critical issue by ending funding for NPR and PBS via executive action. Now, Congress must back up Trump's agenda and use every tool at our disposal to defund these outlets permanently.
That begins by immediately passing a rescissions package to claw back every last cent of the over $1 billion in future funding already earmarked for NPR and PBS. These funds are sitting in the pipeline – approved years in advance, quietly shielded from scrutiny. We can, and we must, cut it.
I commend Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., for supporting this fight and backing our effort to end federal support for these propaganda outlets. But Congress must bring a rescissions package to the House floor as soon as possible.
President Trump has called for bold, historic cuts to the bloated federal bureaucracy. Defunding NPR and PBS is one of the most commonsense places to start. These aren't just budget line items – they're symbols of everything Americans can't stand about Washington: elitism, bias and unaccountable institutions feeding off taxpayer largesse.
This isn't solely about clawing back past funding. We must pursue long-term legislative reforms to block future appropriations to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) – both direct and indirect. Public radio and television stations shouldn't serve as backdoor funding vehicles for partisan advocacy.
I'm proud to lead this fight alongside the president, the speaker, my colleagues in Congress and on behalf of the tens of millions of Americans who are sick of seeing their hard-earned dollars hijacked to underwrite the Left's culture war.
Let's finish what we started. Let's pass the rescissions package. Let's end taxpayer-funded propaganda. And let's remind Washington that the American people are no longer footing the bill for their own humiliation. It's time to defund NPR and PBS – for good.
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