Cutting Public Broadcasting Is Politically Potent But Fiscally Irrelevant
On top of a mountain in Yosemite in September last year, with the nation’s fiscal troubles and the size of the federal government about as far from my thoughts as could be, I would suddenly be reminded of the deeply entrenched divides of American society and contemporary politics.
As my travel companion (a highly educated, woke, fairly average Californian in her 30s) and I approached the peak, we encountered an odd-looking man in a hat. He and his half-dozen collaborators were finding the optimal camera angles and comparing the sun-blistered vistas of the surrounding mountains to century-old drawings. Our new acquaintance turned out to be a filmmaker, until recently employed by PBS.
“These guys are my friends,” he said, gesturing toward the remarkably fit crew of men roughly our age. “Because of the cuts, there’s no money for anything anymore; they’re here on their own dime, helping to make this documentary happen.”
Our hat-wearing filmmaker and my friend looked at each other with quick, pained smiles and “hmm” that only two artsy, big-government types can, the words “tragedy” and “cultural decline” visible across their faces. And there we stood, lamenting in no uncertain terms the “destruction of America” that a sum — all $1 billion of it, spent by the federal government in about an hour — had needlessly brought to our attention. What’s a billion among friends, when the federal government dashes out seven thousand such billions every year?
I’m reminded of that moment as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting this month finally threw in the towel, having had its allocated money cut and canceled in July. The House and Senate attributed the move to a request from the White House and a lingering consequence of DOGE.
CPB was set up by Congress in 1967 to foster educational programming and has acted as a public body of media subsidy ever since. Most of its revenues flow directly to local radio and TV stations (of which NPR affiliates and PBS member stations are the most recognizable).
From its beginning to its whimpering end, many observers inside and outside government considered it vital to facilitate, in the words of its current president and CEO, “trustworthy, educational, and community-centered media” free of commercial interests. In the digital era of the 2020s, you’d think technologies including the internet, having dramatically lowered the bar for all such efforts, have readily achieved that. Besides, whether Republican or Democrat, Americans’ trust in local or national news organizations has fallen by double-digits in a decade. Why pay for a thing you don’t trust?
DOGE, the brief effort in the spring of 2025 to cut government waste and shrink the deficit, has mostly failed and fallen out of favor. There was a brief, shallow moment when proposing to cut government spending was cool: Elon Musk wielded the memetic chainsaw, a poor impersonation of Argentina’s Javier Milei, and Mr. Trump spoke of “tremendous waste” and “bad spending.” Of course, that impetus didn’t last too long. The total waste cut from the outsized federal government amounted to a rounding error, of which CPB might become the most lasting icon.
The estimated savings involved are strangely disproportionate to the outsized media and political reaction it garnered. We spent six months or more viciously arguing over, and ultimately passing, a bill, that did nothing but marginally shift around some of the vast funds coming out of DC.
The political-media industrial complex, which idolizes all things public and taxpayer-funded, howled in pain. Lots of words about “democratic values” and the integrity of the media system were thrown around. But less, if anything, was said about whether taxpayers ought be forced to bankroll radio programs and TV shows they don’t consume — or at least don’t value enough to pay for.
As a fiscal business, if you’re not touching entitlement programs (Medicaid, Medicare, VA benefits) or the defense budget — and there’s nothing you can do about the interest on the national debt — you’re out of luck for reining in the runaway train that is the federal government.
As a deficit-fighting funding cut, the CPB money is irrelevant — keep it or don’t, it matters not. As a political signal of the government’s role in society, it’s weak but perhaps directionally laudable. As a measure to filter out supporters and opponents of “owning the libs,” it’s ingenious.
You could probably predict a person’s political leanings from their reactions to whether or not the government ought to be funding media outlets. My friend and the PBS filmmaker were certainly upset about it. Given these relative truths, the move reeks of political revenge rather than pragmatic politics. Remarked Jesse Walker for Reason, “Sometimes the king would rather lop off a head than watch someone bend the knee.”
CPB claimed to be the single-largest funding source for thousands of public radio and local TV stations, including NPR and PBS affiliates. If those media outlets provide good, valuable content, they’ll find their audience and stay in business. Why the federal government ought to provide means (read: make-work programs) for a small number of journalists and podcasters, in an era when everyone can effortlessly listen to and voluntarily support whichever show they want, makes no sense.
Financing media outlets with public money is tragically unfit for purpose, a legacy of a time when airwaves were scarce and national attention carefully gatekept. Of course, then, we should be happy to see CPB go. But it was too much political bang for too few bucks, purchased by further alienating half the country. Absent national divorce, I have no proposals for how to address that problem, but removing select media funding from Congress’s overburdened plate was not worth anybody’s time.
There are much bigger fish to fry, and a billion is, among friends, practically nothing.