Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Thursday that appropriators did not include funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in a fiscal 2026 spending bill after Republicans successfully yanked back previously approved dollars for public media at President Trump’s request.
“One thing this bill does not do, unfortunately, is fund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. As everyone knows, Republicans rescinded bipartisan funding we provided for CPB in the first ever partisan rescissions package,” Murray said.
“It is a shameful reality, and now communities across the country will suffer the consequences as over 1,500 stations lose critical funding.”
Murray made the remarks as the Senate Appropriations Committee began consideration of the annual bill funding the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education which has traditionally included funding for the corporation that was established nearly six decades ago.
The bill, which calls for roughly $200 billion in funding for fiscal year 2026 for the agencies, was advanced out of committee with bipartisan support.
Earlier this month, Republicans greenlit a bill clawing back already allocated foreign aid and public broadcasting funds, including more than $1 billion in cuts to the CPB, which provides some funding to NPR and PBS.
Many Republicans say the cuts are long overdue, singling out NPR and PBS for what they perceive as political bias. But Republicans in both chambers have expressed concerns about how the cuts would impact the smaller stations they say their constituents depend on.
Some Republicans have also been hopeful of Congress approving some funding for local media ahead of a looming Sept. 30 deadline to fund the government for fiscal 2026.
Opponents of the cuts have already sounded alarm about the fiscal “cliff” that some stations will face as a result of the latest legislation come October.
“It is a cliff,” Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, told The Hill earlier this month.
“They’re already speaking about it, frightened to death, particularly in rural communities that they’re not going to have access to important information or alerts about weather situations, information that they need to know, education for their kids, because they’re not in communities where there are multiple sources of information.”
During the markup on Thursday, Sen. Tammy Baldwin (Wis.), the top Democrat on the subcommittee that crafted the bill, offered an amendment that sought to provide CPB funding for fiscal year 2026. But she said she did not ask for a vote because she believes “there is a path forward to fix this before there are devastating consequences for public radio and television stations across the country.”
“I know that there are majorities in both the House and the Senate that want to fund the CPB, so it’s hard to believe that we have ended up in the situation that we’re in, and I’m going to continue to work with my colleagues to fix it,” she said.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), who heads the Labor-HHS funding subcommittee, said adopting the amendment “would have been contrary to what” Congress has “already voted on.”
“We all know we litigated this two weeks ago, I believe it was and for quite some hours on the Senate floor, and the Senate voted to rescind these funds,” she said, while adding “FEMA warning systems will not be impacted” by the cuts.
But some Republicans have also raised concerns about the cuts they say will have a disproportionate impact on local stations.
“I did vote to move the Labor-HHS bill out of the committee today, even though I have deep concerns about where we are right now,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), a spending cardinal, said Thursday. She acknowledged efforts by Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) to secure an agreement with the administration aimed at shielding tribal stations from the cuts, but she said she still has questions about the effort.
“We’re working with the administration, we’re working with the Alaska Public Media folks to ensure that our stations can receive this,” she said. “But I come from a state where we have half the tribes in the United States of America and of our 26 public radio stations, less than half of them are considered to be tribally owned or serving tribal land.”
Murkowski also pointed to recent tsunami travel advisories Sitka, Alaska, in the aftermath of an 8.8 magnitude earthquake in Russia earlier this week.
“KCAW, the public radio station there, was the first and only to report on this in Sitka,” she said. “They did not receive any notification from NOAA via the EAS, the Emergency Alert System. Our reporters discovered the warning because they talked to public radio down in the Aleutians.”
Murkowski was one of two Senate Republicans to oppose the cuts sought by the White House earlier this month.
Updated at 5:19 p.m.
