Paula Kerger, president and chief executive officer of PBS, was in the Cascade PBS building this week for a board meeting. The PBS board members landed in Seattle the same week Congress debated whether to pull back $1.1 billion in federal funding for public media that was already allocated over the next two fiscal years.
President Donald Trump included the request to claw back the funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) in a package that featured more than $9 billion in cuts to foreign aid and public media over the fiscal years 2026 and 2027. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a nonprofit that allocates federal money to local noncommercial television and radio stations, which include PBS and NPR stations.
Full disclosure: With the proposed cuts, Cascade PBS could lose up to $3.6 million in federal money, which represents about 10% of its total funding. The rest of the funding comes from individual donations, grants and underwriting.
According to Current, a news organization that covers public media, the average PBS station gets about 16% of its funding from federal sources, and the average NPR station gets about 8%. But some public media stations, particularly in rural areas, rely on federal funding for more than half their budget, according to High Country News.
The Trump administration’s request to rescind the money is among several of its proposals to end funding to public media. Trump’s proposed 2026 budget cut several public media grants, including Ready to Learn, which helps develop and research early-learning television programming, and funding for systems that enable broadcasting emergency safety alerts.
Additionally, last month, Trump signed an executive order directing CPB and other federal agencies to “cease Federal funding for NPR and PBS” and accusing the outlets of spreading “radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news.’” CPB responded with a statement saying that Congress established it originally in 1967 as a private nonprofit corporation so it could operate independently and avoid government control.
Both NPR and PBS and several local stations sued to block the order, claiming it violated free speech and arguing that the president does not have authority over the nonprofit CPB. Trump also attempted to remove three board members from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The debate comes as the public is more likely to support public media than not support it, though a third remain unsure, according to a March poll conducted by the Pew Research Center. About 43% of U.S. adults say that funding to NPR and PBS should continue, and 24% say that funding should end.
We asked Kerger about the possible end of funding to public media stations, how public funding works and how PBS might be affected by cuts.
These are excerpts from Kerger’s conversation with Cascade PBS, edited for length and clarity.
Cascade PBS: The Trump administration argues PBS and NPR are politically biased organizations. How do you respond to that?
Paula Kerger: When people talk about bias, they are speaking mostly about our news. Our news represents about 10% of the work that we do. But I would say that, you know, we work really hard to bring together diversity of viewpoints. That’s part of our mission. Our whole focus is to make sure, particularly people whose voices aren’t often heard, that they have an opportunity to be heard on public television.
And if you look back over the years, and even now, we have people across the political spectrum that have a voice on public broadcasting. We have, obviously, the NewsHour, and the NewsHour works to bring in people on all sides of different issues. We have [Firing Line with] Margaret Hoover, who is, who I think does an amazing job of, again, bringing in a wide cross-section of people. And we just launched a new series called Breaking the Deadlock … where you would put a group of people together who are all accomplished in different fields, and they all play the role of someone else, similar to themselves, but not themselves … They’re really forced to think about their positions, and they’re forced to think about why they believe the things they do. But mostly it models a conversation where people come together and really try to wrestle with hard issues. I don’t think that's biased. I think this is exactly the kind of programming that our country needs, and especially right now.
How would cuts affect the programming that PBS viewers are familiar with?
So right now we’re thinking very hard about what cuts we would have to make. Just last month, the Department of Education ended our Ready to Learn funding. This is a grant program that has been in existence for 30 years that has helped us support the production of new programs as well as the research. Our kids’ programs aren’t just safe [programming]. They help kids master very specific skills, so that the first time they enter school, whether that’s at the age of 3 or 4 or 5, they have an understanding of those principles that will help them succeed in school. It’s been really very important to the work that we do. That was immediately canceled … It’s really led to us to cancel the development of new projects, so people won’t see an immediate change. But I think over time, if we can’t figure out a way to bring that funding back in some form, it will have a big impact on kids. And I think if you’re really focused on the future of our country, you have to invest in our kids.
I also think for a lot of our stations, who do a lot of local programming — that could be under pressure … I do think that everyone is going to have to really think about what we can afford to do, and that may be the sacrifice of things that have been very important to our viewers.
Would that look different in rural communities?
In this job, I have been to, not every station but I’ve certainly been to every state. And the work that I’ve seen is so extraordinary. I look at work in small stations, and I see how they are community centers … where people can come in and participate in events. I see the stations deeply involved in outreach … Many of them do farm reports. They do programming on hunting and fishing. A lot of our stations do … high school and collegiate sports. All of that is about community … To me to think about some of those stations, whether it’'s in places like Peoria or Chattanooga, Tennessee, or Granite Falls, Minnesota, these are, these are communities that truly treasure their local stations, and I worry that with the cuts in federal funding, the stations will go dark.
And here’s the thing, if a newspaper goes dark, someone can come back and create a new news service. You can either bring the newspaper back or create a digital service. When the TV stations go and those licenses go, they’re gone and they’re gone forever. So I really am encouraging very hard for those that are making these decisions. And I sympathize. You know, we have to be very rigorous in terms of our investments in federal dollars. I hope that people are really understanding what is at stake and what could be lost.
One other thing our local stations do is they end up being chronicles of those communities. So again, I think about Cookeville, Tennessee, the first time I went there. This is in Appalachia, so it’s a part of the country where a lot of people watch television over the air. And if you go to the station, you will just see racks and racks and racks of tapes of stories from that community. No one else would do that but the local public station. And that’s, again, what I think is so important, something that we shouldn’t lose.
Rob Dunlop
