“I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health.”
Those words were spoken in 1969 by Fred Rogers during a testimony before the U.S. Senate to defend funding for Public Broadcasting. Nearly 56 years later, PBS CEO Paula Kerger echoed Rogers’ defense during a congressional subcommittee hearing on March 26, citing that the American public has consistently ranked public television as “one of the best investments the government makes.”
In many ways, the Trump administration’s current call to defund PBS and NPR is nothing new. Every Republican administration, save for Gerald Ford’s, has attempted to cut funding to public media, often due to accusations of liberal bias. What is new is that there is now a chance it just may happen.
“It’s a bigger threat than other similar threats in the past,” Erica Scharrer, a professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, told TheWrap. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this threat is carried out because similar threats of other cuts, defunding or scaling back of public entities have actually been realized.”
That real threat has hit a real nerve. During Saturday’s “Hands Off” rallies across the U.S. protesting Trump’s policies, many of the signs being held up among the sea of marchers were directed at the CBP/PBS cuts and other assaults on public media.
In March, Congress appropriated $535 million to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), the organization that provides federal funds to public broadcasting stations like PBS, NPR and American Public Television. This will continue federal funding for these organizations through 2027, but the future of public broadcasting beyond those two years looks less certain.
If this funding were to end, it would substantially harm PBS’ budget, roughly 16% of which comes from the federal government. Because most federal funding goes to ensuring underserved areas of the country have a news source, defunding PBS would likely disproportionately impact rural communities. It would also be a major blow to lower income households, which often rely on PBS programming for its children’s entertainment. But it remains unlikely that defunding CPB would eliminate PBS.
It would instead cause irreparable damage when it comes to the network’s commitment to serving its most vulnerable communities, make it more difficult for PBS to regain that funding in the future and would require PBS to turn to other funding sources such as corporations that don’t have as much of an incentive to serve the public good.
A major reason for why PBS’ future feels more uncertain now than in the past is because of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has moved quickly since its founding. Over three days in late March and early April, several government agencies cut 121 contracts worth $350 million, DOGE reported. Those cuts included a $1.6 million contract related to DEI initiatives, as well as a $143,000 contract from the Department of Transportation dedicated to “social media support services.”
Cutting funding to PBS wouldn’t just be a blow to a respected and storied institution. It would be a move that could negatively impact millions of people all over a resource that costs taxpayers less than $1.60 a year.
“Despite all the political theatrics, we really need to be looking more at the life and death circumstances that surround the survival of some of these public broadcasting stations,” Victor Pickhard, a professor of media policy and political economy at the University of Pennsylvania, said.
Who actually watches PBS?
The current argument against funding PBS is one that’s been echoed throughout the network’s history. During the congressional hearing, Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene referred to both PBS and NPR as “radical leftwing echo chambers.” PBS in particular was criticized for featuring a drag queen in its programming.
Kerger clarified that the drag queen in question never appeared during any of the network’s children’s programming and that it was from a digital segment that wasn’t funded or distributed by PBS. And those echo chamber allegations don’t align with PBS’ actual viewership figures.
As of 2025, 35% of adults who watch PBS reported that they’re aligned with the Democratic Party, 26% say they’re aligned with the Republican Party and 37% say that they are Independents. PBS viewers also don’t typically fit the mold of the urban-dwelling liberal elites. About 60% of PBS’ audience lives outside of urban areas and 55% of them live in rural homes. Additionally, 56% of PBS’ audience comes low-income homes.
A major reason for these concentrations in rural and low-income communities comes down to the simple fact that commercial television avoids parts of the country where they are unable to generate profits. Because it’s publicly funded, PBS and its affiliates are able to serve a much greater proportion of the country regardless of zip code. Public TV stations as a whole currently serve nearly 97% of America.
It’s this public service that truly underlines PBS’ national value. It’s no surprise that local media has been declining. Since 2005, over 3,200 print newspapers have disappeared. Though digital media has largely replaced print, these sites tend to focus more on major cities. A report on the state of local news from Northwestern University found that 95% of stand-alone digital news sites were located in 179 metropolitan counties. In 2024, there were 206 counties without any news source as well as 1,561 counties with only one source. That translates to roughly 56 million Americans who have limited to no access to local news, a resource that is especially important when it comes to events like natural disasters or local elections.
There’s also the matter of children’s entertainment. Almost since PBS’ inception, the network has been a leader and innovator in the children’s entertainment space. That started with the premieres of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and “Sesame Street,” but it can still be seen today in shows like “Carl the Collector” and “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.” Unlike competitors in the space, which often seek to entertain children first, extensive research goes into developing programming for PBS Kids to ensure these shows are educational and not overstimulating for younger viewers. This sort of content is vital to many families. Compared to other children’s TV networks, PBS stations reach more children, more multicultural children and more children in low-income homes in a year.
Federal funding allows PBS Kids to look beyond the question of whether or not a show is profitable. “That allows creatives to make programming for audiences in the public interest,” Scharrer explained. “Some of these shows, there’s research that suggests they’re appealing and available across all different income levels and social classes. They’re actually performing a positive role for kids’ development — teaching school readiness skills, teaching how to care for yourself and other people, teaching regard for cultures outside of your own. This programming is doing such important work for an audience that is hugely important to the well being of our society.”
“I just worry about everyone walking away from the child audience,” Scharrer said. “It often gets forgotten about when business is the bottom line.”
For some of its viewers, the fact that PBS is publicly funded actually makes it more impactful. At least that’s the case when it comes to Camille, a PBS viewer who recently rediscovered her appreciation for the network she grew up watching.
“Even just that PBS label, knowing that it’s public television infuses all of its content with a certain approachableness and trustworthiness that you’re not getting other places,” Camille told TheWrap. “It’s high-quality programming without an agenda. I think that’s invaluable.”
What could happen to PBS if CPB is defunded?
In her closing remarks for the March hearing against NPR and PBS, Marjorie Taylor Greene said, “After listening to what we’ve heard today, we will be calling for the complete and total defund and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”
If that were to actually happen, that would mean a roughly 16% loss of PBS’ budget. That loss would be felt most by the network’s member stations, which rely more heavily on funding from the federal government. That also means many of those already ignored news deserts could lose one of their only sources of local information.
“Rural stations would be disproportionately hurt by this. Some stations depend on these federal subsidies for as much as 25 or even 50% of their overall budget,” Packard said. “I’m not sure that all those stations will be able to survive.”
If PBS was defunded, that would require the network to be more dependent on private donations, which presents its own challenges. For one, individual donations typically go to specific stations and not to PBS directly, meaning that larger PBS stations in bigger markets would probably benefit more than those in smaller markets, which arguably need those stations more. These cuts would also require stations to be more dependent on donations from corporations, which is questionable in and of itself.
“It’s having the mission, knowledge and latitude to serve community interests rather than having to worry about whether something will be palatable to advertisers,” Scharrer explained. “‘What does public media do that commercial media does not?’ is an enormous question that everyone should be asking.”
There is another potential impact that is more difficult to identify. The U.K. currently allocates close to $100 per person in taxpayer money to public broadcasting, and it’s more than that for other countries in northern Europe. Slashing a resource that so many other first-world countries prioritize puts the U.S., a country that claims to value freedom of the press, in an odd position. Camille noted that if PBS were defunded, she would feel “personally devastated” and that she believes it would diminish “my belief in the future of this country,” especially when it comes to her consideration about having children.
“I would love for my kids to watch ‘Molly of Denali’ and ‘Arthur.’ A world where they couldn’t because it doesn’t exist, that in and of itself is not the worst thing that could happen. But it’s one more reason I wouldn’t want to have a child in this country. And the reasons are adding up,” she said.
