Funding for National Public Radio has long been a favorite target of House Republicans, and the incoming Congress under President-elect Trump is already rattling its proverbial saber.
The New York Post reports that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who will lead a new House subcommittee devoted to ending what it considers to be wasteful spending, is already issuing some not-so-thinly-veiled threats against the public broadcaster and its budget.
Greene was charged with leading the anti-waste by Kentucky Rep. James Comer, who is responsible for setting up what’s known as DOGE, or the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE was created by Trump appointees Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy.
“We’ll be looking at everything from government-funded media programs like NPR that spread nothing but Democrat propaganda, we’ll be going into grant programs that fund things like sex apps in Malaysia, toilets in Africa,” Greene said Sunday on Fox News Channel. “All kinds of programs that don’t help the American people.”
Greene won’t just be pursuing NPR. She also plans to take on the Pentagon, in addition to governors and mayors of so-called “sanctuary” states and cities that many conservatives consider too hospitable to undocumented immigrants.
“I’d like to… have them come before our committee and explain why they deserve federal dollars if they’re going to harbor illegal criminal aliens in their states and cities,” Greene said.
She continued: “We don’t care about people’s feelings — we’re going to be searching for the facts and we’re going to be verifying if this is worth spending the American people’s hard-earned tax dollars on.”
The attack on NPR comes at the same time House Republicans have made good on their promise to cut funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The pending budget proposal removes CPB funding from the federal budget for the 2027 fiscal year. The White House had proposed $535 million for the nonprofit corporation, which distributes federal dollars to more than 1,500 locally managed and operated public radio and television stations nationwide.
The Senate version has kept the CPB funding in its budget, however, which sets up another battle between the two chambers.
If the funding cut were to hold, it would end a long-running policy in place since President Ford in 1975 that’s given advance funding to public broadcasters to let them make forward-looking programming decisions.