Corporation for Public Broadcasting is officially shutting down months after GOP funding cuts
WASHINGTON — The Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which helped fund NPR, PBS and many local radio and TV stations — is officially shutting down, months after Congress passed spending cuts that stripped the organization of more than $1 billion in funding.
The CBP’s board of directors voted to dissolve the private, nonprofit corporation after 58 years of service, the organization announced in a press release Monday.
“For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans—regardless of geography, income, or background—had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” Patricia Harrison, CPB’s president and CEO, said in a statement.
Harrison added that when President Donald Trump signed into law last summer funding rescinded by Congress, CPB’s board “faced a profound responsibility: CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks.”
CPB said that its leaders determined that “without the resources to fulfill its congressionally mandated responsibilities, maintaining the corporation as a nonfunctional entity would not serve the public interest or advance the goals of public media.”
The organization announced last August that it would begin shutting down after Congress passed the funding cuts. At the time, it said that most staff positions would be eliminated by the end of Sept. 2025 and that a small team would remain through Jan. 2026.
In its statement on Monday, the organization said that it would distribute all of its remaining funds.
Over the summer, the Republican-led House and Senate passed a package of funding cuts targeting CPB and other government agencies, canceling money that Congress had previously allocated to them and fulfilling a request by the Trump administration.
CPB, which was created by Congress in 1967, helped support more than 1,500 local radio and television stations nationwide. It also funded popular programs like Sesame Street. Programs on PBS and NPR have been able to remain on the air due to other sources of funding.
