Congressional Republicans stripped more than $1 billion in funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) this week, a move that could force local radio and television stations to consolidate, cut services or shutter altogether, particularly in rural areas.
CPB is a publicly funded nonprofit that subsidizes more than 1,500 NPR, PBS and local radio and television stations across the country. Congress has typically earmarked $535 million annually for the corporation.
The rescissions bill headed to President Trump’s desk would claw back funding for the next two fiscal years.
Walt Gregg manages KUHB in St. Paul, Alaska, located on a small island in the Bering Sea, and KCUK in Chevak, Alaska. He said the stations will be forced to close by next summer if CPB is shut down.
“Without them, that community doesn’t have anything,” he said. “There’s no local TV, there’s no local newspapers. Some of them barely even have Internet still to this day.”
Stations in major cities would also stand to lose millions, although federal funding accounts for a far smaller share of their budgets.
Here’s how the public media stations across the country stand to be impacted.
Rural stations hit hardest
In 2023, CPB funding accounted for nearly 97 percent of KUHB’s revenue, making it one of the most vulnerable in the country, according to analysis by Alex Curley, a former product manager for NPR who has been collecting data on public media stations on his Stubstack.
Other vulnerable stations include KCUW in Pendleton, Ore.; KSHI in Zuni Pueblo, N.M.; KNSA in Unalakleet, Alaska; KSDP in Sand Point, Alaska; and KGVA in Harlem, Mont. All these stations serve predominantly Native American communities and rely on CDP funds for at least 80 percent of their annual revenue.
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who expressed concerns about how tribal stations would fare under the cuts, said he reached a deal with Trump’s budget office to redirect some unrelated funding to the outlets.
The average radio station in the African American Public Radio Consortium, meanwhile, relies on the federal government for 28 percent of its budget, Curley estimated.
“The more revenue that you generate, the safer you are. That doesn’t mean that you’re necessarily completely safe, but most of the stations that are at risk, they’re not making a lot of money,” Curley said.
The impact of the cuts could also be disparate across states. Curley estimated that the average station in West Virginia depended on federal funding for 37 percent of its revenue, the highest percentage of any state, followed by Alaska and New Mexico.
In 2011, NPR executives attempted to map out what would happen if the federal government stopped funding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Their report, obtained by The New York Times, was bleak. Up to 18 percent of about 1,000 member stations would close, it said, impacting the Midwest, the South and the West the most.
Curley estimated that 65 of 433 stations he analyzed, about 15 percent, would be at risk of closing in the next three years if they lost federal funding.
Largest stations still face cuts
Curley estimates that public media stations rely on federal funding for about 15 percent of their budgets, on average. Stations in major cities may have less reliance than stations in rural areas.
Federal funding represents about 7 percent of the annual budget of KQED, a PBS affiliate in San Francisco. For WYPR in Baltimore, that number is about 6 percent. The proportion is similar for Chicago Public Media, which owns WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times, and for Philadelphia’s WHYY.
WBUR in Boston gets about $1.6 million a year from the CPB, about 3 percent of its annual budget.
But the potential cuts still come at a difficult time for local media, which has been wracked by layoffs and consolidation over the past two decades.
KQED laid off 45 people this week, representing about 15 percent of its workforce. The station had been operating at a $12 million budget deficit, the looming federal cuts notwithstanding.
The direct loss of CPB funding could also force stations to scale back their own programming or air a more limited range of programs from NPR or other stations.
The big picture
The shuttering of local stations could compound the dramatic shrinking of local media over the past two decades, according to a new report from MuckRack and Rebuild Local News.
Federal funding directly accounts for about 1 percent of the budget of NPR’s national headquarters. The broadcaster also has about 250 member stations, also funded by CPB, that pay NPR fees to air their programs.
Those member fees account for about 30 percent of NPR’s annual revenue. Member stations themselves receive, on average, about 13 percent of their funding from CPB.
The role of local radio, which can cover local government alongside disaster or emergency alerts, has been a rallying point for Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), one of the few Republicans to oppose the cuts.
She highlighted this effort on July 16 after Alaska was hit by a magnitude 7.3 earthquake where tsunami warnings were relayed through local stations.
“Some colleagues claim they are targeting ‘radical leftist organizations’ with these cuts, but in Alaska, these are simply organizations dedicated to their communities,” Murkowski posted on X.
Gregg, the station manager in Alaska, said that if his stations closed, they would likely never come back. He said that his listeners were angry, but many were ultimately resigned to the loss.
“A lot of people in the bush communities in Alaska are kind of numb to that stuff because they’ve been through this so much in the past, where things just go away and they just never come back,” he said.
Amalia Huot-Marchand contributed reporting.
