An image collage containing 3 images, Image 1 shows NPR headquarters building in Washington, DC, Image 2 shows Illustration of a smartphone displaying the PBS logo, Image 3 shows President Trump speaking at a podium

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting – which funds NPR and PBS — will shut down after the loss of federal funding, the nonprofit said on Friday

The decision comes weeks after the GOP-led House of Representatives approved $9 billion in cuts to public media and foreign aid – siding with President Trump’s longtime calls to defund outlets he has accused of having a left-wing bias.

Those cuts included $1.1 billion set aside for the CPB over the next two years.

The House passed a $9 billion funding cut to public media and foreign aid last month, including the elimination of $1.1 billion earmarked for the CPB, which distributes funding to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service. AFP via Getty Images

Public media officials had hoped that lawmakers would vote to restore some of that money down the line, but the Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday declined to do so.

“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” Patricia Harrison, president and CEO of CPB, said Friday.

The majority of the CPB’s roughly 100 staffers will be let go by the end of September, the organization said.

A small transition team will remain through January 2026 “to focus on compliance, fiscal distributions, and resolution of long-term financial obligations including ensuring continuity for music rights and royalties that remain essential to the public media system,” the CPB said in a statement.

CPB, created by Congress in 1967, has distributed more than $500 million each year to PBS, NPR and more than 1,500 locally-operated public radio and TV stations.

President Trump argues that financing public broadcasting is an unnecessary expense and that its news coverage suffers from an anti-right bias. Getty Images

NPR has said it receives about 1% of its funds from federal sources annually, and about 3% indirectly from stations. PBS — which features programming like “Sesame Street” — reportedly receives 16% of its funding from the federal government.

Trump, who blasted NPR and PBS funding as a waste of federal dollars, cheered the cuts last month following the congressional vote.

“House approves nine billion dollar cuts package, including atrocious NPR and public broadcasting, where billions of dollars a year were wasted,” Trump wrote in all capital letters in a July post on Truth Social.

Since 1967, CPB has distributed more than $500 million annually to the PBS, NPR and more than 1,500 locally operated public radio and television stations. Rafael Henrique – stock.adobe.com

“Republicans have tried doing this for 40 years, and failed….but no more. This is big!!!”

The Trump administration has also filed a lawsuit against three CPB board members who have refused to abandon their posts despite Trump’s orders for them to be fired.

With Post wires

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting said it will close following Congress’s decision to strip its current funding and foreclose on future appropriations. CPB, established by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, is a nonprofit set up to dole out congressionally appropriated funds to NPR, PBS, and public radio and TV stations around the United States. President Donald Trump launched a successful campaign to claw back the $1.1 billion allocated for the organization for the next two years, a measure he signed into law last month.

At the heart of the campaign was a critique that public media produce news that is biased and too liberal and should not be funded by taxpayer dollars. That argument, long held among many conservatives, finally prevailed thanks to unified Republican government during Trump’s second term.

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“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison said in a statement. “CPB remains committed to fulfilling its fiduciary responsibilities and supporting our partners through this transition with transparency and care.”

CPB not only served as a funding middleman between Congress and public media stations but also negotiated music rights and procured technical infrastructure on behalf of the stations. That leaves an open question as to what entity, if any, will fill that gap.

The closure was announced one day after the Senate Appropriations Committee released a bill that would zero out funding for CPB.

In a press release, CPB said it told its employees that most positions would be cut on Sept. 30, the final day of the fiscal year, and a small team will stay on to shut down the agency through January, in part because the music licenses they have negotiated expire at the end of December.

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“The ripple effects of this closure will be felt across every public media organization and, more importantly, in every community across the country that relies on public broadcasting,” Katherine Maher, CEO of NPR, wrote in a statement.

“We will continue to respond to this crisis by stepping up to support locally owned, nonprofit public radio stations and local journalism across the country, working to maintain public media’s promise of universal service, and upholding the highest standards for independent journalism and cultural programming in service of our nation,” Maher said.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced on Friday it will shut down operations after losing federal funding, delivering a blow to America’s public media system and the more than 1,500 local stations that have relied on its support for nearly six decades.

The closure follows the Republican-controlled House’s decision last month to eliminate $1.1bn in CPB funding over two years, part of a $9bn reduction to public media and foreign aid programs.

“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” said Patricia Harrison, the corporation’s president and chief executive.

The 57-year-old corporation distributed more than $500m annually to PBS, NPR and 1,500 local stations nationwide. Despite the federal support, stations mostly rely on viewer donations, corporate sponsorships and local government support for the remainder.

Rural communities face the biggest impact, as 245 of the 544 grantee organizations are considered rural and many may close without federal support which could affect educational programming, children’s shows and local news coverage. These rural stations also employ nearly 6,000 people, according to the CPB.

Public broadcasting has historically served areas underserved by commercial media, providing emergency information during disasters and cultural programming not available elsewhere.

Rural communities are already hard hit by a lack of community journalism, as one in three US counties do not have a full-time local journalist, according to a July report from Muck Rack and Rebuild Local News.

Most CPB staff will be terminated by September’s end, with a small transition team remaining through January 2026 to wind down operations.

Donald Trump and Republican allies have long argued that taxpayer funding for public media represents unnecessary government spending, while claiming that PBS and NPR programming exhibits anti-conservative bias.

The Trump administration has also filed a lawsuit against three CPB board members who refused to leave their positions despite the president’s attempts to remove them.

The closure ends nearly six decades of federal commitment to public broadcasting. The corporation was established by Congress in 1967 to ensure educational and cultural programming remained accessible to all Americans.

Carrying handouts from the Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in central Gaza on Friday. Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the past two months while trying to secure aid.

Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s envoy for peace missions, went to the Gaza Strip on Friday and visited an aid distribution site as a hunger crisis in the territory deepens.

Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the past two months in Gaza while trying to secure aid, which has led to growing international pressure on Israel to ease the humanitarian situation.

Mr. Witkoff posted a photograph on social media of himself and Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, at an aid site overseen by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, or G.H.F. The much-criticized, Israel-backed group run by American security contractors has taken over a large part of the aid distribution system in Gaza since May.

“We spent over five hours inside Gaza — level setting the facts on the ground, assessing conditions, and meeting with @GHFUpdates and other agencies,” Mr. Witkoff said in a X post. “The purpose of the visit was to give @POTUS a clear understanding of the humanitarian situation and help craft a plan to deliver food and medical aid to the people of Gaza.”

In his own social media post, Mr. Huckabee said that he and Mr. Witkoff had been briefed by the Israeli military and “spoke to folks on the ground.” It was not immediately clear whom he meant.

Mr. Witkoff was wearing a black “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” hat and a blue flak jacket in photographs included in the post.

The G.H.F. has aided Israel in overhauling the system for aid distribution in Gaza as a part of an effort that Israeli officials said was meant to prevent Hamas from benefiting from supplies entering the territory.

However, some Israeli military officials told The New York Times recently that the military has found no evidence that Hamas systematically stole aid from the United Nations, which has provided much of the aid to Gaza since the war there began almost two years ago.

Witnesses have reported that, on a number of occasions, Israeli troops opened fire on crowds of desperate Palestinians as they made their way toward the new aid hubs in search of food. The Israeli military has said repeatedly that its troops have fired “warning shots” when people approached its forces in a threatening manner.

On Thursday, Izzat al-Rishq, a senior Hamas official, predicted that Mr. Witkoff’s visit to Gaza would be a “propaganda show.”

“Witkoff will only see in Gaza what the occupation wants him to see,” he wrote on social media.

In an unusual break with Israeli leaders, Mr. Trump this week acknowledged starvation in Gaza after largely deflecting on the issue, and said more food was urgently needed.

The Gaza health ministry said on Friday that the bodies of 53 people who had been killed while seeking aid were brought to hospitals on Thursday. The exact circumstances of their deaths were unclear.

The U.N. Human Rights Office said at least 1,373 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food in Gaza since May 27. That includes 859 people killed in areas surrounding G.H.F. sites and another 514 along routes used by trucks carrying aid.

It said the Israeli military was responsible for killing most of the people.

While the rights office acknowledged “other armed elements” were in the same areas where killings took place, it said it was not aware of their involvement in the violence.

Israeli officials had hoped the G.H.F. would largely supplant the U.N.-led aid system, but the group has only operated four distribution sites, mostly in southern Gaza. Earlier in the war, hundreds of aid distribution points had been active under the U.N.-led system.

Still, the United Nations and other international organizations have been delivering some aid since the G.H.F. launched its operations, bringing supplies by way of trucks to both northern and southern Gaza.

But those efforts have also devolved into mayhem. Most of the trucks have failed to reach their destinations in Gaza in recent weeks, with hungry people intercepting them en route, often minutes after they enter the territory, and grabbing whatever aid they can.

Witnesses have reported harrowing scenes near the trucks, including people trampling over others and threatening each other with knives.

One U.N. official who toured Gaza in recent days described an increasingly dire situation, especially for children. Ted Chaiban, the deputy executive of UNICEF, said on Friday after returning to New York from Gaza that the enclave was facing a “grave risk of famine,” with some 320,000 children at risk of acute malnutrition. “The marks of deep suffering and hunger were visible on the faces of families and children,” he said.

During the past several days, Israel has allowed airdrops of aid into Gaza, but critics have said they are not an effective way of reaching the population. On Friday, aid packages containing food were parachuted into Gaza in an effort involving Spain, France and Germany.

Mr. Witkoff’s visit to Gaza on Friday was his second this year. He also toured the area in January.

He is the top American official involved in trying to achieve a cease-fire in Gaza and secure the release of hostages held by militants. Israeli authorities have said that up to 20 hostages in Gaza are believed to be alive.

On Friday, Hamas’s military wing published a video of Evyatar David, who had been abducted from a music festival in southern Israel during the Hamas-led, Oct. 7, 2023 attack that ignited the war in Gaza.

Mr. David, 24, appeared emaciated as he sat in a dark tunnel.

Rights groups and international law experts say that a hostage video is, by definition, made under duress, and that the statements in it are usually coerced. Israeli officials have called the videos of hostages periodically released by Hamas and Islamic Jihad during the war a form of “psychological warfare,” and experts say their production can constitute a war crime.

On Thursday, Islamic Jihad, the second-largest militant group in Gaza, released a six-minute video of the Israeli hostage Rom Braslavski. He had been taken hostage from the same music festival.

Mr. Braslavski, 21, seemed pale and thin and cried as he spoke.

“They succeeded in breaking Rom,” the Braslavski family said in a statement shared by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group representing many of the family members of captives in Gaza. “Even the strongest person has a breaking point. Rom is an example of all the hostages. Everyone needs to be brought home now.”

Farnaz Fassihi contributed reporting from New York.

CPB helps fund both PBS and NPR, but most of its funding is distributed to more than 1,500 local public radio and television stations around the country.

The demise of the corporation, known as CPB, is a direct result of President Trump’s targeting of public media, which he has repeatedly said is spreading political and cultural views antithetical to those the United States should be espousing. The closure is expected to have a profound impact on the journalistic and cultural landscape — in particular, public radio and TV stations in small communities across the United States.

WASHINGTON — The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a cornerstone of American culture for three generations, announced Friday it would take steps toward its own closure after being defunded by Congress — marking the end of a nearly six-decade era in which it fueled the production of renowned educational programming, cultural content, and even emergency alerts.

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The corporation also has deep ties to much of the nation’s most familiar programming, from NPR’s “All Things Considered” to, historically, “Sesame Street,” “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” and the documentaries of Ken Burns.

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The corporation said its end, 58 years after being signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, would come in an “orderly wind-down.” In a statement, it said the decision came after the passage through Congress of a package that clawed back its funding for the next two budget years — about $1.1 billion. Then, the Senate Appropriations Committee reinforced that policy change Thursday by excluding funding for the corporation for the first time in more than 50 years as part of a broader spending bill.

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“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote, and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” said Patricia Harrison, the corporation’s president and CEO.

Democratic members of on the Senate Appropriations Committee made a last-ditch effort this week to save the CBP’s funding.

As part of Thursday’s committee deliberations, Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin, authored but then withdrew an amendment to restore CPB funding for the coming budget year. She said she still believed there was a path forward “to fix this before there are devastating consequences for public radio and television stations across the country.”

“It’s hard to believe we’ve ended up in the situation we’re in,” she said. “And I’m going to continue to work with my colleagues to fix it.”

But Senator Shelley Moore Capito, Republican of West Virginia, sounded a less optimistic tone.

“I understand your concerns, but we all know we litigated this two weeks ago,” Capito said. “Adopting this amendment would have been contrary to what we have already voted on.”

CPB said it informed employees Friday that most staff positions will end with the fiscal year on Sept. 30. It said a small transition team will stay in place until January to finish any remaining work — including, it said, “ensuring continuity for music rights and royalties that remain essential to the public media system.”

“Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country,” Harrison said. “We are deeply grateful to our partners across the system for their resilience, leadership, and unwavering dedication to serving the American people.”

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NPR stations use millions of dollars in federal money to pay music licensing fees. Now, many will have to renegotiate these deals. That could impact, in particular, outlets that build their programming around music discovery. NPR President and CEO Katherine Maher estimated recently, for example, that some 96 percent of all classical music broadcast in the United States is on public radio stations.

Federal money for public radio and television has traditionally been appropriated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which distributes it to NPR and PBS. Roughly 70 percent of the money goes directly to the 330 PBS and 246 NPR stations across the country, although that’s only a shorthand way to describe its potential impact.

Trump, who has called the CPB a “monstrosity,” has long said that public broadcasting displays an extreme liberal bias, helped create the momentum in recent months for an anti-public broadcasting groundswell among his supporters in Congress and around the country. It is part of a larger initiative in which he has targeted institutions — particularly cultural ones — that produce content or espouse attitudes that he considers “un-American.” The CPB’s demise represents a political victory for those efforts.