The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds PBS and NPR, announced a change to its operations in the coming months after Donald Trump signed an executive order defunding the television stations. Since PBS and NPR are two of the most well-known platforms in broadcasting, viewers are wondering if this means PBS will shut down as a result.
Below, get an update on what will happen to PBS.
PBS and NPR will no longer have the $1.1 billion of federal funds from the CPB due to an executive order from the White House, which was titled, “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” on May 1, 2025.
Trump said in his order that he defunded PBS and NPR because “government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.”
“At the very least, Americans have the right to expect that if their tax dollars fund public broadcasting at all, they fund only fair, accurate, unbiased, and nonpartisan news coverage,” the executive order indicates. “No media outlet has a constitutional right to taxpayer subsidies, and the government is entitled to determine which categories of activities to subsidize.”
The order claims that “neither” NPR and PBS “presents a fair, accurate, or unbiased portrayal of current events to taxpaying citizens.”
According to the CPB’s August 1 announcement, PBS looks like it will eventually shut down. Per the press release, the company will “begin an orderly wind-down of its operations following the passage of a federal rescissions package and the release of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s FY 2026 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Labor-H) appropriations bill, which excludes funding for CPB for the first time in more than five decades.”
