President Donald Trump moved Thursday night to cut off taxpayer funding for National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service over years of left-wing bias in their coverage.
Trump signed an executive order directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and all executive agencies to stop funding NPR and PBS because of their partisan bias.
“The CPB Board shall cease direct funding to NPR and PBS, consistent with my Administration’s policy to ensure that Federal funding does not support biased and partisan news coverage,” the order reads.
The order instructs the CPB to end existing funding to the extent possible and decline to provide future funding for the two news outlets. Congress allocated $535 million of funding to CPB for the current fiscal year and has fully funded it until September 2027.
His executive action comes after years of conservative calls to defund NPR because of its increasingly progressive bent on social issues and anti-Trump posture.
“REPUBLICANS MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM NPR & PBS, THE RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!” Trump previously posted on Truth Social.
A Pew Research survey taken in March found that a plurality of Republicans, 44 percent, believe Congress should end federal funding for NPR and PBS. Of all U.S. adults, 43 percent said taxpayers should continue to fund them, compared to 24 percent in favor of defunding them and 33 percent who said they were unsure.
Both NPR and PBS receive most of their funding from outside sources, with only 1 percent of NPR’s funding coming from the federal government. NPR’s affiliate stations receive closer to 10 percent of funding from taxpayers and PBS and its stations get about 15 percent of their funding from the CPB.
In March, NPR CEO Katherine Maher testified before the House DOGE Subcommittee and admitted the outlet was mistaken in its initial refusal to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story leading up to the 2020 presidential election.
At the same hearing, Representative Brandon Gill (R., Texas) took Maher to task for her old social media posts defending looting and calling for racial reparations. The posts were part of Maher’s long history of left-wing activism and partisan support for Democrats prior to taking over NPR.
NPR also dismissed the lab leak theory of Covid-19 origins during the pandemic and extensively covered false claims of collusion between Donald Trump and the Russians in 2016. The outlet no longer posts on X because of billionaire Elon Musk’s changes to the platform, a decision it made as liberals began migrating to left-wing alternative Bluesky in 2023.
When Trump signed the executive order, the administration’s social media team shared a lengthy thread of NPR and PBS’s left-wing coverage on racial issues and embrace of gender ideology. An example the administration cited was NPR’s 2022 decision to stop reading the Declaration of Independence on July 4th and its subsequent editor’s note warning that it contains “offensive language.”
Former NPR editor Uri Berliner wrote a scathing editorial in the Free Press last year about the outlet’s drift into left-wing partisanship beginning with Trump’s first term, based on his experience working there for 25 years. Berliner’s editorial gives an inside account of NPR’s failure to adequately cover the Hunter Biden laptop story and lab leak theory, and its embrace of racially divisive diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in nearly every aspect of its operations.