The Corporation for Public Broadcasting is going dark after Congress clawed back half its funding by passing President Trump’s budget. The CPB announced on August 1st it would shutter at the end of the month. The cut is set to inflict maximum damage to publicly supported radio stations around the country.
At KGNU radio in Colorado, Jack Armstrong of Morning Magazine interviewed Station Manager Tim Russo and Associate Professor of Media Studies Josh Shepperd about the CPB cuts and their local impact.
Jack Armstrong In Early August, Congress signed a bill into law to withhold a total of $9 billion in previously allocated funds. $1.1 billion of those funds were withheld from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds community and public broadcasting stations around the country. KGNU was one of the stations that was affected by the decision, with the station losing more than 15% of its operating budget. Station Manager Tim Russo, along with Associate Professor Josh Sheppard, agreed to speak with me about the effect this measure will have on our public media ecosystem.
Josh. Do you think you could quickly go over your background and then speak on the specific ways that this legislation harms stations around the United States?
Josh Shepperd Yeah. I’m an associate professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado, and I researched the policy and institutional history of democratic media, and I’m currently co-writing the official history of NPR and PBS for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
So, the CPB essentially receives funds that are allocated by Congress, typically planned two years in advance in case there are changes, and then their job is to distribute them to content creators, which are NPR and PBS, and their affiliates. And there’s an informational ecosystem of roughly 1500 stations that are connected to the CPB.
Most of these funds go to infrastructure. So, what does that mean? It means transmitters, towers, recording equipment, and this is to meet what they call compliance for the FCC, so renewal of licensure, and so the content is, of course, very important, and it’s what we’re attached to personally and in our communities, but it’s secondary for the CPB. They largely deal in what we call block grants to keep stations like KGNU on the air. So, the rescission bill, as they call it, doesn’t just strike against the programs that we love. It actually attacks the capacity to operate and produce programs at all.
Jack Armstrong Could you clarify what it means that these funds were previously allocated and now they’re revoked from public media stations around the country?
Josh Shepperd Yeah, so the allocation is typically about 550 million right now. It was raised over the last past few years under Biden a little bit, and that usually has a two-year kind of cushion. So, let’s say funds are cut. Typically, that means there’s a change in the budget, that means they would have some time to plan to find the funds. So, what the rescission does is just cut the funds period, and they also did it for USAID and these other crucial public programs. Public Media was just one of several public institutions attacked by the rescission bill. And just for context, it was about $9 billion which is a lot of money, of course, but the budget was like 3.7 to $4 trillion so they kind of packaged it together seasonably, so it seems like a drop in the bucket compared to the larger budget. The budget was really code this year for cuts, you know, to public programs and then tax cuts for the wealthy. So, the amount that goes to public media, is relatively tiny. It’s extremely tiny compared to the larger budget and even what was cut within the rescission bill, but then it has this huge impact on democratic media and communication.
Jack Armstrong Analysts are saying that these funds and these cuts will really start to hit around a few years from now, 2026 and 2027, but that there’s also expectations of even more cuts, and that the Trump administration was sort of using these cuts as a test case. Could we see deeper cuts, further into the 2030’s?
Josh Shepperd It really depends on the administration. And I mean, that’s probably the good news or the bad news. It depends on what happens.
Hypothetically, the budget could be reversed, and there could be more money in the public media system in a few years, depending on how elections go or who the president is.
What other ways might they cut? There are more other indirect ways that funding is distributed. There are other operational costs for emergency broadcasts and stuff that come out besides Corporation of Public Broadcasting funds. This is the meat and potatoes, though, of the system. This is the fundament of the system. So, what’s going to happen now is they’re going to have to look for alternative ways to raise those funds at most public media affiliates. My prediction is that NPR is like 1% or something. PBS is close to, I think, KGNU in percentile, about 15%, they’re going to be fine. They might have to find what they call carve out, which is they might have to, like distribute in different channels. But the rural stations, let’s take eastern Colorado or far Western Colorado, Southern Colorado, wherever there might be an affiliate, are going to be hugely affected as our community stations.
Jack Armstrong Now, pivoting to community stations. Tim, could you run us through the numbers? What did KGNU lose in this decision that revoked $1.1 billion in previously allocated funds to public media?
Tim Russo Very specifically for KGNU, the funds that are being clawed back that were previously approved to be distributed for fiscal year 2026 which actually begins on October 1st of 2025 to understand that-that’s 155,000 almost $156,000 of the KGNU News operating budget.
We’ve got about a million-dollar budget, which is already a very, very slim and extremely frugal budget. We’re able to punch well above our weight, thanks, in huge part, to the community, to our business partnerships and really to the lifeline of KGNU who are the listeners and the volunteers who allow us to have, ostensibly a volunteer staff of several hundred individuals, when we’ve got a paid staff of just about nine individuals right now and a couple of interns. So, we’ll lose about $155-156,000 for fiscal year [FY 26] which starts on October 1st, and we’re looking now at our budget thinking, ‘What do we have to do in order to try to come up with a balanced budget in order to move forward’? We’ll lose a similar amount of funding for FY 27, which is two years forward funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting that has been approved, that was clawed back and revoked, right?
That impact is huge for us. That’s 15% or 15 ½ % of our operating budget. And we’re really going to take the approach to lean into community as much as possible. Community and community listeners and supporters are what has sustained KGNU historically, which makes up about 70% of our operating budget. And we’re going to have to lean into that.
My hope is that communities around the country really lean into all their community and public radio stations. I think it’s important for us to say that a lot falls under the umbrella of the Public Radio and public media system, but there are some real distinctions there, and the largest one is the participation and access from the community that allows us to really reflect the communities that we are based in in a way that is slightly different from the larger statewide entities, right? We partner with all of those, and we have a very robust ecosystem of community and public radio stations.
In Colorado, we have over 20 community and public radio stations, all of them are taking a different level of hit from the funds that are being clawed back through the community service grants that we would receive through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Now, as Josh was saying, there’s other funds that are also being affected, and that includes the next generation of warning systems that was a CPB and FEMA partnership to fund a new infrastructure for outdated equipment for most of the community radio stations around the country, KGNU included.
At KGNU, we’re working with very outdated equipment. Our main board has been in the studio for over 20 years. We have outdated transmitters, outdated emergency alert systems, and so the Next Generation Warning System [NGWS] grants were put into place to support stations in being able to better serve their communities, in times of disaster through updated infrastructure. And that funding is also being clawed back because of a work stop order from the Trump administration dissolving those funds for FEMA and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. So, it’s a bit of a double whammy for stations that already had those funds approved, and a double whammy for stations who had pending proposals that were being reviewed, that have been canceled now at this point, like KGNU.
So, as we’re in for an infrastructure upgrades process, we’re going to have to be creative about how we go about that so that we can continue to best serve our community.
And you know, I know that there are some naysayers out there around tax dollars supporting media, but we have to take a look at on average, $1.60 per family, is what taxpayers are paying into the public media system, and it’s been a crucial system around the country, in particular for rural and mountain areas, and in disaster prone areas where community and public media really play a huge role when other systems drop. We know that firsthand here from the floods and the fires in the foothills, where oftentimes cell towers and other forms of communication just drop, and internet access is very limited.
People depend on community radio stations and public media stations to be able to provide emergency alert systems to direct folks to road closures, animal shelters, et cetera, in order to evacuate different areas.
And that’s really the reason why Lyndon Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967 that came from the Carney Carnegie Commission report, saying that education and communication were cornerstones to a healthier democracy and greater equity across the country. So, we look back to that, and we also trust in community. The community understands that the airwaves are public. They’re a public good and community and public media and journalism are a public good that deserve support from those who listen, tune into and depend on these services.
Jack Armstrong
Thank you both for joining me and for really educating listeners on what’s going on locally as well as federally. I also want to say that news coverage like this is made possible because of local listeners, especially in the wake of these deep funding cuts.
Edited for print by Stephanie Schubert.
CC CPB photo by Jen Gallardo on Flickr.