Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), said Friday that only Congress, not President Donald Trump, has the authority to defund PBS and NPR.
Harrison released a statement after Trump signed an executive order late Thursday that cut funding to PBS and NPR. The Trump administration has labeled both news outlets as partisan and biased.
“CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority. Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government,” Harrison’s statement read.
CPB, a private nonprofit corporation, was created by Congress in 1967 and provides funding for more than 1,500 locally managed public radio and TV stations.
“In creating CPB, Congress expressly forbade ‘any department, agency, officer, or employee of the United States to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over educational television or radio broadcasting, or over [CPB] or any of its grantees or contractors …’ 47 U.S.C. § 398(c),” Harrison’s statement concluded.
Several media outlets reported that the White House plans to ask Congress to rescind $1.1 billion in funding for the CPB, with the amount being two years’ worth of funding. NPR receives less than 1% of its annual budget directly from federal grants while 16% of PBS’ funding comes from federal sources.
At issue for the Trump administration is that NPR and PBS, it said, has ideologies that are “leftist, Marxist, biased and woke.”
NPR CEO Katherine Maher told a House panel in March that “we were mistaken in failing to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story more aggressively or sooner.” Further, she admitted it was a “concern” that NPR’s editorial boards were comprised of 87 Democrats and not a single Republican.
The Trump administration also sought to shut down Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and Middle East Broadcasting Networks, whose news broadcasts are funded by the government. A federal judge ordered the Trump administration in late April to halt those efforts.
Information from Reuters was used in this report.
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