Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Its Impact on Information Resilience
Project 2025 called for an end to federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a goal executed through a May 1, 2025 Executive Order and the July 2025 Rescission Act, leading to CPB's formal dissolution on February 28, 2026. While presented as fiscal conservatism, this move degrades democratic information ecosystems, reduces community-level emergency communication capacity, and weakens soft power by ceding informational influence to authoritarian competitors.
Project 2025's plan to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) was fully enacted: a May 1, 2025 Executive Order directed the CPB Board to cease funding to NPR and PBS, and the Rescission Act of 2025, signed into law in July 2025, eliminated over $1 billion in already-appropriated CPB funding. CPB announced on August 1, 2025 that it would shut down by January 2026, and it formally dissolved as a corporate entity on February 28, 2026. The second prong of Project 2025's media agenda—instructing the FCC to strip NPR and PBS stations of noncommercial educational (NCE) status—has not yet been executed as of the research date.
This is not merely a domestic media policy dispute; it is a foreign-policy vulnerability. Public broadcasting systems in democracies serve as bulwarks against disinformation and as platforms for local journalism that sustains community resilience—qualities that matter acutely in crisis zones. When the United States dismantles its own public media, it signals to allies and rivals alike that information integrity is expendable. Authoritarian states, which invest heavily in state-controlled media and disinformation campaigns, interpret this as a strategic gift. The Quincy Institute's research on the cost of war versus diplomacy underscores that investments in informational resilience are far cheaper than rebuilding trust after conflict. By hollowing out CPB, the U.S. diminishes its ability to project soft power through credible, independent journalism—a tool that authoritarian competitors like China and Russia exploit through their own state-funded outlets and influence operations.
The alternative is not to defend the status quo of CPB funding but to treat public media as a strategic asset. Congress should pass a new appropriations bill restoring multi-year advance appropriations to CPB, creating a publicly accountable but politically insulated trust fund, as originally recommended by the 1967 Carnegie Commission. The President should rescind the May 1, 2025 Executive Order and direct the CPB Board to resume funding for NPR, PBS, and local stations. This approach would stabilize U.S. information infrastructure, rebuild domestic trust, and restore a credible counterweight to disinformation campaigns—costing a fraction of a single weapons system, as the Quincy Institute's cost-of-war analysis consistently demonstrates.
Rollback path — how this gets undone
This action has already been implemented. These are the concrete levers that could reverse it.
- Rescind Executive Order 'Ending Taxpayer Subsidization Of Biased Media' The next administration must issue a new executive order revoking the May 1, 2025 EO and directing the CPB board—or its successor—to resume funding for NPR and PBS.
- Pass new appropriations bill restoring CPB funding Congress must pass legislation that reinstates the advance appropriations mechanism for CPB and allocates at least the pre-2025 level of $565 million per year, preferably via a dedicated tax or trust fund to insulate it from annual political fights.
- Reconstitute the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a corporate entity After funding is restored, the CPB must be formally reestablished via an act of Congress, appointing a new bipartisan board to oversee grant distribution to member stations.
Original source — excerpted
project2025 Project 2025 ch. 9: Agency for International Development (pp 279-281)"— 246 — Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING Mike Gonzalez E very Republican President since Richard Nixon has tried to strip the Corpora- tion for Public Broadcasting (CPB) of taxpayer funding. That is significant not just because it means that for half a century, Republican Presidents have failed to accomplish what they set out to do, but also because Nixon was the first President in office when National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which the CPB funds, went on air. In other words, all Republican Presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake. As a 35-year-old lawyer in the Nixon White House, one Antonin Scalia warned that conservatives were being “confronted with a long-range problem of significant social consequences—that is, the development of a government-funded broadcast system similar to the BBC.”47 All of which means that the next conservative President must finally get this done and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary. To stop public funding is good policy and good politics. The reason is simple: Pr…"