Give credit to Mike Johnson and Donald Trump for yet another minor miracle in herding cats. The prize in this case should not have required it, but nonetheless, the two succeeded in getting the first rescission bill through Congress in 26 years. It took a long vote again to get the vote they wanted, but in the end, the effort to remove $9 billion from the FY2025 budget appropriations passed by three votes:
🚨 POTUS to sign rescission package this afternoon at the White House — “Big signing at 2:30 in the White House. Congratulations to our GREAT REPUBLICANS for being able to accomplish so much, a record, in so short a period of time.” pic.twitter.com/TjdEeJnJTa
— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) July 18, 2025
The GOP-controlled Congress canceled $9 billion in federal spending for foreign aid and public broadcasting, following through on President Trump’s efforts to defund the programs and overcoming some resistance among Republican lawmakers.
The House passed the Trump administration’s plan, 216-213 early Friday. Two Republicans voted no with the Democrats: Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio. The Senate had passed it in the early hours of Thursday morning, 51-48, also largely along party lines, with Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joining Democrats in opposition.
Much of the funding returned to the Treasury was appropriated for the State Department. Most of the sturm und drang around the rescission bill focused on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which may need a new name soon. NPR, PBS, and local stations lost all of their federal funding for this cycle, and one might have thought that the world was about to enter another Dark Age as a result.
NPR and its allies went on a last-minute blitz to get Republican lawmakers to change their minds, which may be the first time in decades that NPR even bothered to engage them. Local stations urged their urban-core progressive listeners of such fare as Microfeminism: The Next Big Thing in Fighting the Patriarchy and These Drag Artists Know How to Turn Climate Activism into a Joyful Blowout to contact their GOP representatives, when it seemed far more likely that their congresspeople were on the other side.
The New York Times editorial board, which has as much connection to rural Americans as NPR and PBS, insisted Wednesday that public broadcasting was a “lifeline” to such communities. They later edited that out of their headline, but Matt Taibbi screen-capped it, adding:
It should have run forever. National Public Radio ruined the enterprise, turning the country’s signature public news shows into an endless partisan therapy session, a Nine Perfect Strangers retreat for high-income audiences micro-dosing on Marx and Kendi. Forget conservatives, NPR’s trademark half-whispered stylings linking diets to rape culture or denouncing white teeth as a hangover of colonialism began in recent years to feel like physical punishment to the most apolitical listeners, like having a blind librarian hacksaw your forehead. Even today’s New York Times piece couldn’t argue the bias issue, instead offering a mathematical deflection:
Republicans complain, not always wrongly, that public media reflects left-leaning assumptions and biases. And they can fairly tell NPR and PBS to do a better job of reflecting the citizenry that is subsidizing them. Yet the “national” part of NPR (or National Public Radio, as it used to call itself) that chafes conservatives may well be just fine without federal funds. Only about 2 percent of its budget comes directly from the federal government, and it may have an easier time raising money from its many dedicated listeners if Congress punishes it.
Is this an argument for or against public funding of NPR? If listeners can make up the shortfall, why don’t we just do that and be done with the controversy? One reason is that the Times is doing what most outlets do in covering this story, skipping the inconvenient detail that NPR derives a significant chunk of its revenue from member stations using public funds to purchase its programs. That’s still a federal subsidy, only less direct, and not as easily made up by “dedicated listeners.”
Indeed. The NPR/PBS argument that defunding threatened their “independence” has also been an inversion. Almost every media outlet in this country is independent except for those funded through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. By claiming that an end to federal subsidies meant an end to their operations, public broadcasters made clear their lack of independence.
Uri Berliner pointed this out at the Free Press yesterday, offering them a sarcastic congratulations on their ‘Independence Day.’ Their dependence was more than just financial, Berliner notes — it was also ideological, which set them up for exactly these consequences:
Maher’s most serious and dubious claim is the one that began her Congressional testimony, her core message about NPR and public media delivering “unbiased” reporting. NPR’s progressivism is obvious to any fair-minded person who listens or reads long enough. If you want more than my perspective, there’s also this, this, and this—all data-driven assessments of NPR’s coverage that come to the same conclusion. If there’s one reason why the Senate just voted to defund NPR, it’s the failure of Maher, or anyone in NPR’s leadership, to acknowledge this basic fact.
In the first week of November 2022, after a spate of particularly egregious coverage, including a piece entertaining the merits of dumping soup on masterworks in the name of fighting climate change and another suggesting that worries about crime were racist, I emailed a top NPR news executive and said we were headed for trouble.
“The lack of viewpoint diversity and the unwillingness of top editors to push back against one-sided, opinionated journalism is causing great harm to NPR,” I wrote.
I predicted that if the GOP swept the upcoming 2022 midterms, NPR would be headed for defunding and “and unfortunately, we will have given them the ammunition that they need.”
My timing was off by a few years.
The timing may have been off, but only because the Joe Biden Regency would have stopped any attempt to defund NPR, PBS, and the hard-Left public-broadcasting archipelago. As soon as it could be accomplished, though, it was.
However, it was only barely accomplished. Republicans nearly stumbled at cutting 0.13% of the budget in this rescssion package, and only 0.9 % of the waste that the DOGE team claimed to have identified. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the GOP now plans another rescission effort, but …
The passage of the rescissions package again showed off Trump’s ability to muscle legislation through the narrow GOP majorities in Congress and pressure holdout Republican lawmakers to get in line. The cuts are the first time a White House has accomplished clawbacks in more than a quarter-century, and White House officials made clear that they would pursue additional reductions.
I’ll believe that when I see it. It seems more likely that they will focus on the next budget cycle, and that the reductions there will be similarly limited if they exist at all. In fact, one has to wonder whether the next budget gives the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a new lease on life. Democrats will demand it, and Republicans seem barely able to cut this even when everyone’s looking. Stay tuned.
Editor’s Note: NPRPBS, the New York Times, and the rest of the Protection Racket Media continue to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
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