Death to Big Bird
Plus: Jerome Powell on Trump's kill list, conservatives embrace speech restrictions, homeschooling heat, and more...
Senate approves cancellation of public broadcast funds: This is possibly the only kind of cancellation I can get behind!
Early this morning, the Senate voted 51–48 to remove $9 billion allocated for foreign aid and public broadcasting at the behest of the White House. Roughly $8 billion is for foreign aid, while roughly $1 billion will be cut from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds both NPR and PBS. Two Republicans—Sens. Susan Collins (R–Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R–Alaska)—voted in opposition to the rescission bill.
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"If the rescission bill ultimately makes it through Congress and President Donald Trump signs it, then Republicans will turn all the drama surrounding Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) into a meaningful, if small, reduction in federal spending," writes Reason's Eric Boehm. But these cuts, he notes, are just easy, palatable ones that will curry favor with the Republican base; they're marginal tweaks that avoid grappling with entitlement spending or anything that would actually have a bigger impact. "We're a long way from the $500 billion rescission request that Sen. Rand Paul (R–Ky.) originally sought," adds Boehm, "and even farther from the $2 trillion in cuts that the Trump administration (with help from Musk, back when he was on the inside) promised to deliver." Still, it's a start.
"When the private sector doesn't provide an important service, the government often steps in," writes The New York Times' editorial board, arguing against the cuts to public broadcasting. "That is why the framers established the U.S. Postal Service; they believed no one else would deliver the mail to the entire country. Many places in America, especially in rural communities, would not have a library without public funding."
"If the rescission bill becomes law, hundreds of cities and towns, especially those outside major metropolitan areas, will be affected," continues the editorial board. "Nearly one in five NPR member stations could close down without federal funding, one analysis found. Listeners in the Midwest, South and West would be the hardest hit, becoming less informed about their communities."
Such arguments are weak in a pluralistic media environment. You do not need state provision of Sesame Street. You can get newer seasons for free on YouTube, or access the rich archive from the '70s and '80s via HBO Max (or via some YouTube spelunking). Other shows have emerged since Sesame Street's inception in 1969 that teach kids similar lessons. Now, the issue is not that kids have too little access to educational shows, but rather that many of them spend too much time watching screens.
Local news is in decline because there are natural limitations on how large the market can be, because sometimes there's just not that much stuff happening, and because sometimes the quality of reporting is terrible. But massive operations like The New York Times still send reporters out to places where natural disasters have hit—like Kerrville, Texas—to do on-the-ground reporting. With scale comes a greater ability to dispatch reporters in such a manner. It's not like this rural Texas tragedy has gone unreported.
The initial examples cited don't help their argument either: The U.S. Postal Service takes forever to get our mail to us compared to DHL, Amazon, or UPS. Maybe it's outlasted its usefulness, artificially propped up by government funding. (But at least it gave us some wild scandals and the term going postal.) Libraries are not exactly super useful in an era where people have near-universal internet access.
Like the phoenix, Big Bird will never truly die, even if the rescission bill passes. He will be reanimated via HBO Max and YouTube archives, no matter what happens to PBS. It's just that cuts must be made somewhere, to save taxpayer dollars, so why not start here?
Jerome's in the house (for now): "President Trump denied that he was planning an attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell after polling Republican lawmakers during a closed-door meeting about whether he should oust him," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The president suggested he could attempt to remove Powell for cause, arguing the central bank spent too much money on renovations of two historic office buildings." But he also keeps claiming that Powell refuses to cut interest rates, and is trying to blame the state of the economy on him (as opposed to his own tariffs).
Kevin Hassett is a top contender for who would replace him (Trump has flip-flopped on firing Powell so many times that we probably shouldn't assume anything is for certain). Hassett currently serves as director of the National Economic Council and believes that the Fed cutting rates before last year's election, then putting rate cuts on hold during the early days of this administration, "raises the specter that they're not being non-partisan, they're not being independent."
Scenes from New York: Some encouraging signs are emerging that people are mobilizing against socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, who recently won the Democratic primary. Mayor Eric Adams' fundraising haul, from June 10 to July 11, amounts to $1.5 million—a chunk of which has come from outside New York City (mostly Florida, not his pals in Turkey). For that same period, Mamdani has raised $852,000 (though $256,000 of that sum is eligible for public matching funds, so his actual haul could be closer to $1.1 million). Mamdani, too, is getting a ton of out-of-state contributions: an eye-popping 45 percent of contributions came from outside New York. Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has raised only a paltry $64,000.
QUICK HITS
- Conservatives, formerly against campus "free-speech zones" (shouldn't all of campus be a free-speech zone?), have decided to embrace speech restrictions. A few new bills passed by the Texas legislature and signed by Republican Gov. Greg Abbott ban encampments, the use of megaphones or speakers during class hours (if anyone claims that such "expressive activity…intimidates others"), and the wearing of masks during protests. Any expressive activity that happens between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. is banned as well. Taken in fullness, it's not very subtle what they're doing: Trying to prevent Texas campuses from becoming pro-Hamas encampments—a laudable goal. But it's coming at great cost to students' free speech rights, and campuses already have plenty of rules and regulations at their disposal to break up protests that involve property destruction, trespassing, harassment, and the like.
- What exactly is Trump's foreign policy? Is it something libertarians can get behind?
- "A record share of American firms froze investments in China as trade ties worsened earlier this year, a recent survey suggests," reports Bloomberg. "Fewer than half of the companies surveyed by the US-China Business Council between March and May said they planned to invest in China in 2025, a drop from 80% last year and a record low since the group began asking a similar question in 2006, according to the Wednesday report."
- The Heritage Foundation unveils a new digital tool that allows policy wonks, journalists, and normal Americans to examine Department of Defense spending to track where their tax dollars are going.
- Homeschooling mom (and journalist and former Just Asking Questions guest) responds to the drive-by heat homeschooling gets online (including people saying they wish it were banned):
Homeschooling is one of those things where the people who do it have generally made it one of the major focuses of their life and put thousands of hours of thought into it - which curriculum to use, which philosophy/approach, which tests and camps and resources, etc -
— Kelsey Piper (@KelseyTuoc) July 16, 2025
I'm not sure this can be emphasized enough:
It's always worth mentioning that homeschooled students outperform their public school peers on every academic metric.
— Seasonal Clickfarm Worker (@ClickingSeason) July 15, 2025
