Senate Axes NPR Funding

Date:  July 19, 2025

Why was the American taxpayer financing a far-left Democrat propaganda machine? Listening to it was painful.

NPR has 87 editorial positions filled by registered Democrats in DC and zero Republicans.

The White House on NPR:

Liberals are howling in despair and anger, NPR’s President is insisting that NPR isn’t biased, and Democrats are complaining that defunding state-run media is destroying freedom. Republicans? They are celebrating as the Senate passed the president’s rescissions bill defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Slightly more than 10% of the spending cuts are aimed at the CPB, but nearly 100% of the news coverage is complaining or celebrating the stripping of funds for NPR. Award for most ridiculous defense of NPR goes to its President Katherine Maher. Curtis Houck: NPR CEO Katherine Maher argues rural America often has no other possible source of news or connection to the outside world EXCEPT through PBS and NPR: “Large rural communities, large tribal communities” don’t have “a lot of other options. Broadband service is not universal, and heck, even cell phone service is not universal. There’s a real understanding of the need there as well as for emergency alerting, in which public media plays an extraordinarily important role.” (X)

Second best observation comes from T. Beckett Smith: NPR and PBS quit Twitter in 2023 after being labeled “government-funded media,” arguing the funding they receive is so trivial as to render such a designation unfair and inaccurate. Now, we’re told the potential loss of the allegedly trivial funding poses an existential threat. (X).

Senator Jim Banks: Let’s review the facts:

In 2020, NPR branded the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “waste of time.” Meanwhile, NPR had no problem covering the fake Steele dossier as part of the Russian collusion hoax meant to hurt President Trump during his first term in office.

Let’s also not forget that NPR not only dismissed the COVID lab leak theory, claiming it had been “debunked.”

You can’t make this up.

As if that weren’t bad enough, NPR’s new CEO, Katharine Maher, said back in 2020 that the “number one challenge here [to censoring Americans] that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” Maher believes that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

Why exactly should the American people be writing her paychecks with their tax dollars?

Unfortunately, it only gets worse. According to Uri Berliner, a 25-year NPR veteran who resigned last year, NPR’s woke editors monitor reporters’ interviewees, run “unconscious bias” training sessions, and host employee affinity groups, including a “Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program” and a group for “Latinx employees at NPR.”

Meanwhile, here’s just some examples of NPR’s “hard-hitting journalism” in the last few years, paid for with your tax dollars: A documentary condemning Teddy Roosevelt’s statue in New York City as “racist”; a news feature titled “What ‘Queer Ducks’ can teach teenagers about sexuality in the animal kingdom”; and a Valentine’s feature around “queer animals.”

The problem is not that NPR doesn’t resonate with the American people. It’s that NPR actively despises the American people, forcing them to subsidize its liberal propaganda with their tax dollars. As Katherine Maher herself said in a now deleted tweet, “Donald Trump is a racist.” I bet she and her colleagues feel the same way about President Trump’s supporters.

That is why this vote on President Trump’s rescissions package matters. Defunding NPR and these special interests are one of the more important parts of President Trump’s agenda in shaking up the status quo here in Washington. The American people’s tax dollars have funded groups like NPR for decades that have little to nothing to do most of the time with improving the American people’s day-to-day lives.

I’m glad that we finally have a president who is serious about putting an end to NPR’s free ride at the taxpayer’s expense. We finally have a president who is serious about putting the American people first and making sure that their tax dollars are being spent wisely.

That is why I am proud to stand with President Trump and my colleagues here in the Senate on getting this rescissions package over the finish line.

House passes rescissions package slashing $9B in federal funding for foreign aid, NPR and PBS

By Victor Nava, NY post, July 18, 2025, 12:29 a.m. ET

House Republicans approved a clawback package Thursday that will cut $9 billion in previously approved federal outlays for foreign aid, NPR and PBS.

The so-called rescissions bill passed 216-213, with GOP Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio joining all present Democrats in voting no.

The House faced a Friday deadline to pass the measure, which the White House transmitted to Congress in June in an effort to codify cuts to wasteful spending identified by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

The Senate passed the bill early Thursday morning, with Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) joining all 46 present Democrats in opposition.

The latest House vote approved changes to the measure made by the Senate. It will now head to President Trump’s desk for his signature.

The measure returns about $8 billion earmarked for the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and upwards of $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds PBS and NPR — spending conservatives have long sought to slash.

House Republicans had passed a form of the package early last month, but the Senate struggled over it for weeks amid various concerns about some of the cuts.

Eventually, the Trump administration agreed to scrap plans to cut some $400 million from a federal program aimed at fighting AIDS worldwide.

An effort by Democrats in the House Rules Committee to tack on an amendment calling for the release of documents related to notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was blocked by Republicans on the panel.

Republicans in the Rules Committee opted to instead move forward with a nonbinding resolution backing the “public release of certain documents, records, and communications related to the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), who could have exercised his powers under the rules of lower chamber to speak for as long as he could in opposition of the measure, opted to give only a 15-minute speech Thursday night.

Earlier this month, Jeffries used his so-called “magic minute” of debate delay passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for almost nine hours, shattering the record previously held by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought is expected to send other rescissions requests to Congress in the coming months.

Article posted with permission from Pamela Geller

 

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