As conservatives strive to curtail operations at the U.S. Agency for International Development, they should stay on offense and defund other examples of government philanthropy gone wrong. Priority number one: public broadcasting.
GOP congressman Greg Steube of Tennessee introduced legislation earlier this week to abolish USAID. With other prominent Republican lawmakers like representatives Chip Roy (Texas) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) rallying behind this idea, now is the time to harness this momentum and defund another federally funded hobby-horse of the liberal establishment: public broadcasting
National public radio in particular — and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in general, which oversees NPR and Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) — are prime examples of Great Society-era programs whose original mission has become obsolete, and whose current form has mutated to become just another mouthpiece for a comfortably entrenched liberal establishment.
In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law legislation establishing the CPB, which was ostensibly intended to meet a need for universal access to non-commercial, high-quality content and telecommunications services. In 2025, however, this need no longer exists — and has not for quite some time.
CPB’s mission, according to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, is supposedly to be a non-partisan organization, with a “strict adherence to objectivity and balance in all programs or series of programs of a controversial nature.” As the record will show, however, for the self-styled “steward of the federal government’s investment in public broadcasting,” this has been far from the case.
As Mike Gonzales, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, noted earlier this year, “Yamiche Alcindor, PBS’s White House correspondent between 2018 and 2022, used her public broadcasting job to practice activism for far-left causes rather than journalism.”
Gonzales went on to observe, citing a study from the Media Research Center, “PBS staff used 162 variations of ‘far-right’ labels and only six ‘far-left’ labels, an astounding ratio of 27 to 1.”
The study also documented a specific breakdown of these terms in relation to then-presidential candidate Trump. “PBS staff and guests employed 17 total “fascist” labels of Donald Trump,” the study found, “compared to three for Kamala Harris as “communist,” with two of those three denying she was one.”
For CPB and its $535 million budget, though, left-wing bias is business as usual.
As Ian Ritz reported on behalf of The Epoch Times, senior executives at NPR had been caught on video denigrating conservative political groups even as far back as 2011, leading to several resignations from the then-board of directors, but no subsequent amelioration of the underlying liberal ethos at the organization.
Consider, for example, the fact that NPR’s current — not former — president stated in a 2022 TED talk, “I think our reverence for the truth might have become a bit of a distraction that is preventing us from finding consensus and getting important things done.”
Without a doubt, NPR — in fact, the whole CPB — represents a prime example of government initiatives that should have their funding and workforce dispersed by a motivated new Trump administration and a mission-aligned Congress.
As newly-appointed Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr wrote earlier this year, “I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS given the changes in the media marketplace since the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967.”
President Trump should direct his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to audit the entirety of CPB’s funding and balance sheets, examining them for fraud.
As Americans living in 2025, it’s time for us finally to separate ourselves from our nostalgic view of public broadcasting. In a culture that has long-since departed from traditional communication channels, it’s time to realize that the forms of media that CPB was created to promote are obsolete.
And, if that’s not enough, the program as it is currently organized has become subject to mission drift and is now functioning as a left-wing mouthpiece. NPR’s original purpose is no longer relevant. Its current form is harmful to Americans. Public funding of NPR, PBS, and the entire CPB must go. Only in the absence of what amounts in effect to state-sponsored journalism will truly independent sources of facts and stories emerge in a relevant manner.
Frederick Woodward is a sophomore studying political economy.
