Corporation For Public Broadcasting Shutters Months After Trump, Congress Yanked Its Funding

A taxpayer-funded nonprofit that partly financed PBS and NPR announced Monday it will dissolve completely, five months after it announced it was shutting down due to President Donald Trump and Congress slashing its funding.

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) said in a Monday press release that its Board of Directors voted to shut the 58-year-old entity down, citing the $9 billion rescissions package that Congress passed and Trump signed in July 2025, which trimmed $1.1 billion of its taxpayer-funding over two years. The nonprofit also said a factor in its decision to dissolve was what it called “sustained political attacks that made it impossible for CPB to continue operating as the Public Broadcasting Act intended.”

“When the Administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our Board faced a profound responsibility: CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic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 President and CEO Patricia Harrison said in the press release.

“CPB’s Board 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 now-defunct nonprofit’s press release stated. “A dormant and defunded CPB could have become vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse, threatening the independence of public media and the trust audiences place in it, and potentially subjecting staff and board members to legal exposure from bad-faith actors.”