Does your work have a sushi bar with a sushi chef in a chef hat?  As part of a full-service, fully-staffed cafeteria able to seat 200 people at a time in plush furniture and plush, designer surroundings?  How about a fully-staffed fitness center?  I bet your work doesn’t have its own private power plant.  You read that right: not a mere back-up generator, but an honest-to-God back-up power plant.  Got that? Got honey-bee hives?

I’m guessing “no.”

If you have a friend or acquaintance who’s outraged — outraged! — that the Republicans clawed back a billion bucks from NPR/PBS, invite them to consider the following:

According to The Washington Post:

The [NPR] endowment had a balance of $368.2 million at the end of its fiscal year in September 2021, the most recent in which data is available.

But that’s just the endowment.  Money they (theoretically) don’t spend.  Let’s have a little look at how they do spend their precious dollars from viewers like you.

In the spring of 2013, NPR Washington D.C. opened a brand new, seven story, 330,000/sf, $201M building housing its studios, production suites, and an NPR store open to the public, but that’s just the basic stuff any media company might have.  Pfft.  They drove right over basic and made basic their road-kill.  $201M buys you a media palace of progressive architecture.

It “is environmentally friendly… includ[ing] a green roof, bike racks for 72 bicycles, and a garage with electric vehicle charging stations.”  And that “32,500-SF green roof”?  It comes with “honey bee hives.”

One of the partners in the build describes it this way:

[It] includes a 110,000-square-foot parking structure, a two-story newsroom… a 2,400-square-foot performance auditorium, a full-service kitchen and staff cafeteria, a fitness center, and a stand-by power generation plant…so that a power interruption would never be known to the studio occupants.

The primary architect, Hickok Cole, has a lovely page dedicated to their work there.

NPR’s new home tells the historic media brand’s story with each element of design – including a glass-wrapped corner lobby, which represents the organization’s virtue of transparent and honest journalism.

The “virtue” of their “honest journalism”?  Ok.  Also:

One of the building’s most memorable features is a dynamic glass fin system made of six shades of blue that serve as an abstract expression of sound waves. As the sun moves throughout the day, the fin’s shadow dances around the perimeter of the building, and into the workspace, showcasing a cascading array of beautiful blue light.

Image: Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.

Talk about “blue light special.”  Free symbolic sunlight!

Evidently the coffee is also “free,” and according to Chris Plante of WMAL, there’s a full service sushi bar, with a chef in a chef hat and everything.  Seems they’ve got the room.  Once again, from Hickok Cole’s website:

The 200-person Soundbites Cafe…features stadium style seating for staff events and collaboration among co-workers. Additional gathering spots and features include a 12,000-SF conference and training facility, a staffed fitness center….

They’re not “starved” for cash.  NPR has testified that only 1% of their funding comes from the federal government.  The New York Times says it’s 2%.  I’m guessing your work has gone through budget contractions which are far worse and survived just fine.  Enough with the caterwauling.  If they can’t find 2% to trim in their budget, they don’t deserve another penny.  They can start with the sushi chef.  Or the guy that hands them a towel in their fully-staffed fitness center.  Or the honey-bees.  Or… you get the idea.