Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
President Donald Trump arrives at Tuscaloosa National Airport, May 1, 2025, in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
While you slept, Donald Trump was mad. So he fired off a late-night executive order that purports to block federal funding to National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service.
This is a sign of weakness.
NPR and PBS are perpetually under threat of losing funding when Republicans are in power, but they never pull the trigger because a critical mass of lawmakers in the party don’t actually want to vote against Big Bird. This time was supposed to be different. The GOP was determined to use a mechanism to vote down currently funded initiatives that the president wants to ditch. A rescission package avoids the Senate filibuster; the president simply sends a list of requested rescinded spending and it gets an up-or-down vote.
As of last month, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds NPR and PBS, was going to be on that list. The $9.3 billion rescission package was notably small, considering that DOGE has illegally blocked something like $430 billion in appropriated spending. It really only included foreign aid and the CPB, which gives NPR and PBS an annual contribution of about $1 billion. (Maybe 1 percent of the total budget for NPR and PBS comes from federal sources.) That’s because a rescission package cannot be amended; Trump tried a larger one in 2018 and the vote failed. With only one shot at making a list with sufficient political support, it got pared down to the bare essentials. And NPR/PBS funding was one of those essentials.
Trump was supposed to send over the rescission bill this week. Then it got delayed, and now the timeline is the end of this month. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers have started to grumble about cutting even this tiny fraction of spending. They don’t actually want to be responsible for, you know, causing masses of child deaths in foreign countries, or even, apparently, revoking support for public media.
So before Trump sends the rescission package, he does this executive order maneuver, which includes a bunch of boilerplate about bias in public media. It orders CPB to end direct and indirect funding to NPR and PBS, including by changing its eligibility criteria for grantees. But as the president and CEO of CPB, Patricia Harrison, immediately pointed out, CPB is a private nonprofit corporation that is “wholly independent of the federal government” and not subject to the president’s whims.
The only durable way to defund public media is to defund CPB. And Trump was on the road to doing that with a simple majority vote in Congress. Then he apparently pulled the plug and went it alone. Reading between the lines, we can presume that there aren’t enough votes for rescinding CPB funding, or for a rescission package that is toxic because it’s attached to a president with a 39 percent approval rating.
The president has a 2026 budget request out today that aims to cut nondefense discretionary spending by 22.6 percent, and that’s probably going to get thrown in the garbage too, since the budget requires Democratic cooperation.
Donald Trump is unpopular, and DOGE even more so. He governs by executive order because he has to, because his ideas are anathema even to a party that’s supposed to be putty in his hands. Members of Congress are inching away from their standard-bearer as his approval rating sinks. Trump resorts to wild, dubious orders that get bogged down in the courts because he has no other way to operate. It’s unreliable, it’s unlawful, and it’s unlikely to succeed.
