Are Public Broadcasters About To Lose Their Subsidies?
Republicans often call for cutting off the funds but have never actually done the deed. Here's why this time might—might—be different.
Will the federal government cut off its subsidies to public broadcasters this year? The New York Post reports that the White House's "rescissions" plan will include a request that Congress withdraw $1.1 billion already appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). That wouldn't be absolutely everything Washington spends on public media—The New York Times notes that the administration doesn't plan to claw back some money being spent on emergency communications—but it's close.
If you've been following the politics of public broadcasting for a while, this will sound familiar. There is a long history of Republicans calling for an end to such subsidies, but they have never actually done the deed. They often don't even reduce the money that goes to NPR, PBS, and the rest—and when they do, it's just a short time before the broadcasters' budget is higher than it was before. Instead, the usual effect of these standoffs is for the networks to appease the GOP by hiring some conservatives and/or getting rid of some programming conservatives don't like. That pattern is so well-established that I've come to see those hirings and firings as the point: Republican leaders use the threat of cutting the broadcasters loose as a way to keep them in line. President Donald Trump certainly hasn't been shy about using federal purse strings to bend institutions to his will, so it's not hard to assume that he's doing the same thing here that he's been doing with, say, universities.
But the dynamics may be different this time. There is a chance—a chance—that this year the CPB's subsidies will actually stop.
There are two reasons to think that. One is the drama unfolding at the federal government's other big radio/TV operation, the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which funds the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, and the like. Trump tried to remake that empire in his own image during his first term, but this time he seems to have decided that that's fruitless: He issued an executive order last month to shut the agency down "to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law." What's more, he did that even after the Voice of America reportedly reacted to the administration's faultfinding by cracking down on criticisms of the president.
That isn't what you do if you want to MAGAfy the Voice of America. It's what you do if you figure MAGA has enough megaphones already and doesn't need a fight to add the Voice of America to its collection—or if you'd just rather get revenge on an institution than take it over. The same thought process could be at work with NPR and PBS. Sometimes the king would rather lop off a head than watch someone bend the knee.
The second reason is the very nature of a rescission bill. When Trump called for cutting off the CPB in his "skinny budget" of 2017, he was basically writing fanfic. The actual budget was produced by Congress, with all the logrolling, lobbying, and compromises that entails; by the time the legislation reached the floor, the CPB's subsidies were untouched. This approach, by contrast, would be sure to bring the question to Congress for a vote. What's more, it would be an up-or-down vote on a matter where both the president and the party base would like to see the broadcasters go down.
It's not that Trump is philosophically opposed to mixing the broadcast booth with the state. If anything, he's been eager to use federal power to twist arms in the press: The Federal Communications Commission has been wielding its authority as a crude hammer under its current chairman, Brendan Carr, a man willing to go to war over even Saturday Night Live on his boss's behalf. But it is not unprecedented for a president who hates much of the media to deploy big government as a weapon in one moment and to pull government back in the next. Richard Nixon used everything from antitrust threats to the Fairness Doctrine when extracting concessions from broadcasters, so he was in no sense a limited-government guy. But he also realized that allowing more competition in the TV market could hurt his media foes, and that thought led eventually to one of the most important deregulatory acts of the 1970s: the Open Skies policy, which swept away entry barriers in the satellite market.
All that said, the rescission bill's success is not guaranteed. The proposal was reportedly drafted by White House budget director Russell Vought, an ideological opponent of this sort of spending; it is conceivable, though not especially likely, that another faction of the administration will change it before it reaches Congress. And if it does reach Congress, it will face a narrow (though still plausible) path in the Senate.
Yet for the first time in ages, I think something like this might pass. The last time that thought seemed realistic was during the Gingrich Congress of the '90s—not when Republicans threatened to zero out the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but immediately afterward, when the CPB itself signaled its willingness to evolve into an independent trust fund that didn't take money from the feds. There were proposals then that would have eased the broadcasters onto their own two feet (by, say, giving them a parting gift of proceeds from spectrum auctions) rather than suddenly cutting them off in the middle of a fiscal year. It was the sort of compromise that one could imagine becoming policy.
Once it became clear that the federal funds would keep flowing, such notions fell by the wayside. If this bill goes through, a lot of broadcasters may find themselves wishing they took that path back then.
