Federal Cuts Put Local Public Media Stations in Immediate Jeopardy

The most consequential fact in Paula Kerger’s account is the timing. Public broadcasting had been funded two years in advance, and stations were counting on federal money for 2026 and 2027. Congress’s rescission came in July, with stations expecting money in October. Kerger contrasts that with Newt Gingrich’s 1990s effort, which she describes as a three-year plan to zero out funding.

That compressed timeline is why Kerger treats the recent fight as different from earlier political pressure. It was not simply another round of hostility toward public media. It changed the operating assumptions of local stations that had already budgeted for support.

In her telling, the pressure began in January 2025 with a letter from Brendan Carr, whom she identifies as head of the FCC. She says Carr accused public broadcasting of running commercials, said the FCC would investigate, and warned that if PBS was doing what he thought it was doing, he would tell Congress to defund it. Kerger frames that as outside the normal workings of the FCC. The underwriting practices at issue, she says, were developed with the FCC, including under the Reagan administration, when public broadcasters were given more flexibility than the old “blue card” acknowledgements so they could build corporate relationships without crossing into commercial advertising. PBS, she says, pays close attention to those boundaries.

Then came, in Kerger’s account, a letter from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who Kerger says was then chair of the DOGE committee, summoning her and the head of NPR to a hearing titled “Un-American Airwaves: Holding the CEOs of PBS and NPR to Account.” Of everything that happened during the year, Kerger says, that phrase was the most offensive to her.

The next escalation, as Kerger describes it, came through an executive order from the president. She says it directed that no federal dollars could go to PBS or NPR, and that stations receiving federal dollars could not use any of those dollars for PBS. She describes signing PBS’s lawsuit against the president as the most sobering moment of the year, and perhaps of her life. She had never expected to sign such a document against a president of the United States.

The day after the executive order, PBS received another blow, according to Kerger. She says the Department of Education ended funding through Ready To Learn, a grant program PBS had received for 30 years. She describes the program as principally aimed at helping children not in formal pre-K — more than half of children in the country, according to her — get information that would help them succeed in school. Television mattered because it could reach into every home, and broadcast still reaches many homes where geography or economics make over-the-air viewing important.

Ready To Learn funded new children’s programs and research. Its cancellation meant “immediate pens down” on work in progress, Kerger says, including Phoebe and Jay, a children’s program about two children growing up in lower-income housing in Los Angeles, made by two filmmakers new to public broadcasting and series television. PBS was also working on American Sign Language for many children’s programs; that work, she says, was canceled too. PBS scrambled to assemble money to keep the children’s project moving.

The congressional rescission hit a system in which, Kerger stresses, 80% of federal public broadcasting money does not go to PBS or NPR national operations; it goes to stations. That was the point of Lyndon Johnson’s design: sustaining local service in places without large funding bases. The consequences vary sharply by market. Kerger says WNET in New York, where she previously worked, gets about 6% of its budget from the federal government. The station she mentioned in Cookeville, Tennessee, gets about 50%.

1. January 2025
   Kerger says she received an FCC letter from Brendan Carr accusing public broadcasting of running commercials and threatening an investigation tied to defunding.
2. 2025
   Kerger and the head of NPR were summoned, in her account, to a hearing titled “Un-American Airwaves.”
3. 2025
   Kerger says an executive order sought to bar federal dollars from going to PBS, NPR, or stations’ payments to PBS and NPR.
4. The day after the executive order
   Kerger says the Department of Education canceled Ready To Learn funding, halting children’s programming and research work in progress.
5. July 2025
   Congress rescinded public broadcasting funding that stations had expected to receive beginning in October, according to Kerger.
6. October–November 2025
   A bridge fund sent checks to eligible stations that were more than 25% reliant on federal funding, Kerger says.

PBS lost the House vote and then worked the Senate. Kerger says she is reluctant to ask creative partners to intervene in political fights, but at the end she called Ken Burns because the vote was close. Burns was on the West Coast with The American Revolution. Kerger asked for help; he asked for phone numbers. Before going onstage in San Francisco and Los Angeles, he called senators. Kerger says PBS believed it had the votes. After a pause of about an hour and a half, it lost by one vote.

Burns says Corporation for Public Broadcasting support had become about 20% of his work over the last 15 to 20 years; earlier in his career it had been a larger share. Losing it is, in his words, “a huge devastating blow.” He spoke to senators who knew and liked The Civil War but, in his view, were caught in an ideological trap. Some had positive conversations with him but ultimately did not vote as he hoped. Others he had thought were friends changed or succumbed to pressure.

The disjunction, for Burns, is between what lawmakers privately value and how they vote publicly. He recalls testifying ten times in the 1990s before House and Senate panels on appropriations or authorization for the endowments or CPB. In earlier fights, he says, some lawmakers were worried about funding news, although they admitted privately that they listened to NPR on the way to work. He calls the current disconnect “stunning,” marked by hypocrisy and a lack of “profiles in courage.”

Kerger gives a similar example. At a Capitol Hill event in the fall, she says some of the same people who voted to defund PBS nearly pushed her aside to get their picture taken with Burns. She also says some legislators appeared surprised to learn that defunding public broadcasting meant their local stations lost money, even though those stations host debates, bring legislators into studios, and serve their communities.

Burns adds that the loss was not simply a line-item cut. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting supplied institutional memory, staff, accounting, and review. He had to write proposals and justify grants; he did not always get funded. Stations submitted materials and staff reviewed them. A senator suggested to him that funding could later be added piecemeal to bills, but Burns argues that the “superstructure” that made the system rigorous and functional had been cleared away.

The near-term recovery plan, in Paula Kerger’s account, is not one thing. It is a bridge fund for the most exposed stations, an unexpected increase in members, a search for more sustainable local models, and a possible argument that public broadcasting should be supported as infrastructure.

After the rescission, PBS worked with Tim Isgitt, who runs Public Media Company and had previously worked at CPB. Kerger says Isgitt had modeled the vulnerability of radio and television stations and concluded that stations more than 25% reliant on federal funding faced an existential issue.

Together, they built a bridge fund. Mostly foundations — including some that had never previously given to public media — contributed money. Stations, both radio and television, with more than 25% reliance on federal funding could apply when they would otherwise have received their October and November grants. Checks went out. Kerger says the fund stabilized those stations and created a runway, hopefully about two years of funding for eligible stations that applied. PBS is also working with them on longer-term sustainability.

The second positive sign is public response. Since July of the previous year, Kerger says, public broadcasting stations gained one million new members. She initially assumed post-defunding checks might come in as a one-time expression of concern about the country, information, and pressure on media. What encouraged her was that most of the new members did not make one-time contributions; they signed up for monthly giving.

Kerger does not present that as enough. “This has not solved our problem,” she says. PBS is still here, but preserving it will require the public to “lean in together.” Ken Burns makes the same point more sharply. Of every 100 people who watch public broadcasting, he says, only single digits are members. He argues that number must rise if public broadcasting is to free itself from repeated assaults on its independence.

The legal and institutional picture remains unsettled but not entirely bleak in Kerger’s account. She says PBS laid off 100 people and made deep cuts. At the same time, she sees an opportunity to reconsider what is essential, because organizations rarely change when things are going well. She also cites positive legal signs as she understood them that morning: a judge had ruled the previous day in a case brought on behalf of National Endowment for the Humanities grantees whose already-made grants had been stripped away, finding that action unlawful; and the period for the government to appeal PBS’s lawsuit had ended two days earlier without an appeal.

Kerger also points to a function of public broadcasting that many viewers do not see: infrastructure. Broadcast remains crucial during natural disasters, she says, when cell service can quickly fail. Public broadcasters are part of the emergency alert system and, according to Kerger, serve as the redundant backbone for that system nationally. Because broadcast infrastructure is one of the largest costs for stations, she sees that public-safety role as one possible path to restoring some public funding. Government, in her phrase, funds infrastructure.

Her hope is cautious. She says she is beginning to feel a change in some conversations, but the effort will be a long slog and will require collective action, not only for public broadcasting but for other national problems as well.

John Dickerson frames public broadcasting’s founding purpose through a personal example. In 1971, shortly after PBS went on the air, his mother, Nancy Dickerson, appeared as the PBS representative on a panel of network anchors interviewing the president. The other network figures were men. For Dickerson, the significance is not only biographical. Public broadcasting, he says, existed “to broaden the definition of who belonged in the national conversation.”

Paula Kerger traces that broader purpose to a premise deliberately different from the American media market around it: commercial media would do important things, but it would not do everything the country needed. The United States, she notes, did not begin with a public broadcaster in the way many countries did. It began with commercial media, and public broadcasting had to be carved out afterward.

Kerger places Frieda Hennock, the first woman FCC commissioner, at the beginning of that story. Hennock watched television emerge and concluded that the technology would have “extraordinary power.” If the commercial marketplace alone governed it, Kerger says, the result would be incomplete. Hennock pushed to reserve radio and television spectrum for educational use. It was not prime spectrum: on radio, Kerger says, the low numbers many public stations still carry reflect the “least desirable” part of the dial; on television, the licenses were UHF. But the set-aside mattered because it created the possibility of a public educational system even before there was money to support one.

The early licenses went to local institutions, including the University of Houston, which Kerger identifies as the site of the first public television station. Many early stations were in Western and rural communities, often required by states that wanted educational content to reach across large distances. The original logic was practical: if every school could not offer Advanced Placement history, English, or language classes, broadcast could widen access. The “E” in many station call letters, Kerger says, comes from those educational licenses.

That local structure remains central to Kerger’s account. Public broadcasting stations are “locally owned, locally operated, locally governed.” Johnson’s Public Broadcasting Act, in her telling, did not replace that local system with a centralized broadcaster. It created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a federal funding stream intended to sustain local stations, with particular attention to places that could not rely on large local donor bases. New York, Boston, Denver, and similar markets might be able to sustain a station; Cookeville, Tennessee, Eureka, California, and Alaska might not. In parts of Alaska, Kerger says, public broadcasting is the only broadcast service because there are no commercial broadcasters.

That widening did not happen only through news or politics. Kerger emphasizes that many stations came on the air in 1969 and 1970 because communities wanted Sesame Street. She says that in her 20 years at PBS, she has visited almost every station and every state, meeting many of the mostly women who worked to put stations on the air, sometimes through bake sales as well as lobbying.

The institution that resulted was never insulated from politics. Kerger lists moments when public broadcasting might have collapsed: Watergate, when PBS carried the hearings “gavel to gavel” so viewers could make their own judgments and angered President Nixon; Gingrich’s Contract with America; the rise of cable channels that seemed to make public television redundant, including Discovery, the Learning Channel, A&E, and Bravo; and the funding fight of the last year. Her refrain is simple: “We’re still here.”

Ken Burns says his relationship to PBS began as both a choice and, for the kind of work he wanted to make, an inevitability. He expected to make films for theaters: “dark rooms among strangers,” the shared communion of cinema. But the subjects he wanted to take on required long development, and the funding available to him came largely from local humanities groups, state organizations, foundations, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Those funders expected the films to be offered free to public television.

Burns describes an early “aesthetic quandary”: whether moving from a theater to the small screen was a capitulation. His answer became no. Other documentary filmmakers might reach a few hundred people at festivals, a few thousand through limited theatrical runs, or tens of thousands through cable. PBS could put a documentary before tens of millions. The smaller screen made possible “a much bigger conversation.”

The more important distinction, for Burns, is not audience size but working conditions. He says he could not have made his body of work anywhere else. The example he returns to is The Vietnam War: ten episodes, eighteen hours, $30 million, and ten and a half years of work. A premium cable outlet or streamer, he says, might have committed the entire $30 million in a half-hour meeting, but would not have allowed the decade-plus required “to incubate the scholarship” and understand the story. It would have wanted the series in a year and a half or two years. It would also have imposed layers of executives giving notes on whether to make it “more sexy or less sexy,” longer or shorter, more violent or less violent.

Burns is careful not to describe his process as unaccountable. He and his collaborators work with scholars, writers, colleagues, and feedback; they do not treat filmmaking as “my way or the highway.” But he draws a boundary between that kind of intellectual and editorial discipline and market-mediated programming notes. PBS, he says, has “one foot tentatively in the marketplace, and the other proudly out of it.” The foot outside the marketplace is what has allowed his films to exist.

That distinction also shapes the educational afterlife of the work. Paula Kerger says a commercial streamer or network would care less about how programs live beyond the broadcast event. PBS, by contrast, builds materials for classrooms and public use. She points to Sarah Botstein, Burns’s co-director on The American Revolution, as central to developing classroom assets for that series.

The task is not simply to urge teachers to show an entire documentary. Kerger says the more effective approach is to understand when the American Revolution appears in a student’s school history — she says it is taught three different times between elementary and high school — and then create materials aligned to the curriculum. Teachers, she says, are among the heaviest users of public broadcasting, both personally and professionally.

Burns describes a similar process from the filmmaker’s side. Usually about a year before broadcast, when a project is emerging from the editing tunnel, his team begins thinking about educational outreach, budgeting modestly and seeking additional funders. Earlier outreach, he says, often meant flashy underwriting materials that may have gone into teachers’ wastebaskets. The current work is more practical: lesson plans, questions, and ideas tailored to age, place, and moment in the curriculum. For The American Revolution, that thinking began five years out, supported by the Kern Family Foundation of Wisconsin, which funded both production and a much larger educational effort through PBS.

Kerger also sees technology as fulfilling the educational promise in a way earlier versions could not. In the past, PBS sent packets to teachers and hoped the right person received them at the right time. Now classroom materials can be delivered by broadband, free, to teachers and homeschoolers. That shift matters because the programs are not only broadcasts; they become durable public resources.

Burns argues that durability is part of the discipline. He rejects the cliché that history repeats itself: no event has happened twice. The useful formulation, attributed to Mark Twain, is that history rhymes. Filmmakers, Burns says, are obliged to hear those rhymes but not play to them. If they make work only “of this moment,” it disappears like skywriting. If they make it with permanence, a child can watch all 11 and a half hours of The Civil War decades later and think it is new.

John Dickerson presses the question beyond PBS’s special funding crisis: public media is also operating in an attention environment transformed by streaming, platforms, and distraction. Paula Kerger accepts the premise but rejects a common conclusion. Even before defunding, she says, conditions were not easy. But she disputes the idea that people, especially younger people, no longer have the attention span to watch more than a five-minute clip.

Her examples are Burns and Frontline. Raney Aronson, who runs Frontline, is, in Kerger’s view, one of the strongest examples in public media of adapting without abandoning the long form. Frontline still produces full-length documentaries and airs them on YouTube. Kerger says the audience on YouTube is under 35, while broadcast audiences tend to have an average age over 65, and that those younger viewers are watching full segments, not only short clips. At the same time, Frontline builds short-form work for other platforms.

The strategy is not to replace depth with snippets but to create multiple paths into the work. Kerger sees the same possibility in Burns’s library, which PBS is working to make accessible to the public. Viewers can leave a live event and go home to watch Jazz, The Civil War, Statue of Liberty, or a tribute to David Attenborough. Technology, in this telling, helps public media because it extends the life of work whose value is not tied to a single broadcast window.

Trust is the other advantage Kerger claims for PBS in an abundance economy. People are trying to identify information they can trust, and she says the PBS brand remains meaningful. She connects that to science education. After attending a session on “truth decay and science,” Kerger says the country is chronically undereducated about science. People often do not understand the scientific method or that knowledge changes as science evolves. What was known yesterday may differ from what is known today; that does not mean the public was intentionally misled in the past. Helping people understand that process is, for her, part of PBS’s role.

Podcasting enters the discussion as another form of reach, but not as a substitute for the central work. Asked about NPR and podcasts, Kerger notes that she does not run NPR, but credits NPR as being at the forefront of podcasting through Serial. On the television side, she says PBS is interested in the video and YouTube forms that function like podcasts and in using talent across platforms.

Ken Burns describes podcasting as promotional but also substantive. In the past, he says, a public television tour meant traveling to cities, meeting big station donors at lunch, doing a public screening, and perhaps speaking with a newspaper editorial board. Now all of that still happens, plus many podcasts. The important part, he says, is consistency: he said the same thing to Joe Rogan and Theo Von that he said to The New York Times editorial board and inner-city schoolchildren. Podcasting can create a critical mass in a different space and bring people not only to programming but to the ideas beneath it.

Ken Burns says he began work on The American Revolution in December 2015 without focusing on the coming semi-quincentennial; only halfway through did the 250th anniversary become obvious as a context. The need for an origin story now, he argues, resembles the way an individual in trouble is asked where they came from, who their parents were, and how they became who they are.

The film’s version of that origin story is not the old top-down account alone. Burns says it includes “scores” of people not usually foregrounded. There are 400 first-person voices in the film, representing 150 people, read by 61 actors. The point is tactile: to feel the sacrifices, the lives, fortunes, and sacred honor mutually pledged. That history, he says, reminds Americans that they always have stakes in the project.

He describes the American project as active rather than passive: a process, a pursuit, a more perfect union. That connects directly to the public media funding question. If one million new members joined after the rescission, Burns says the number should be three million next year. Public broadcasting cannot remain dependent on institutions that repeatedly attack its independence.

Paula Kerger says The American Revolution became the most important project PBS could have done at this moment. The country is torn over how to mark the anniversary, and some people do not want to talk about it. She says that five years earlier, she, Burns, and Botstein had one idea of what the project would be; over time, it became something different. As she travels, people tell her the period has been difficult and that understanding where the country came from matters for deciding where it is going.

Kerger links that back to her anger over the phrase “Un-American Airwaves.” PBS, in her view, is among the most American of organizations because of its local ownership, local operation, local governance, and federated structure. It is bottom-up and exists because people choose to make it exist. Its own history, she says, is improbable, as the country’s story is improbable.

Burns offers the most compressed version of that civic claim in response to a former public broadcasting board chair who urged them to keep emphasizing education. He recalls making a film on the National Parks subtitled America’s Best Idea, then revises the hierarchy. The best idea, he says, is the Declaration’s founding principle itself. The parks were “the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape.”

The same civic argument shapes the advice Burns and Dickerson give to a young former Colorado Public Radio intern who asks how to enter journalism at a moment when, during the lawsuit, her office had security guards outside and staff feared for their safety. Burns answers first with Frederick Douglass: “Agitate, agitate, agitate.” Prompted by Kerger, he adds Richard Powers’s line that the best arguments in the world will not change a single point of view; only a good story can do that. Storytelling matters, for Burns, because it makes room for complexity: heroes have flaws, so-called ordinary people can do extraordinary things, and the work resists the “tyranny of the binary.” Dickerson adds a journalist’s version of the same counsel: start every day with fiction, because it enlivens sympathy, opens empathy, and wakes the imagination.