Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.

At noon on Friday, just hours after Congress revoked more than 1.1 billion dollars in funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, more than a hundred and fifty member stations joined a closed-door Zoom call with NPR leadership. The federal funding they had spent months trying to save was gone. What remained was a shared sense of loss, exhaustion, and the daunting task of reevaluating their mission and programming.

In an emotional hour-long call, station leaders grappled with fallback plans and infrastructure gaps. Some large stations offered to share resources with smaller ones. Others voiced gratitude for NPR’s efforts in Washington. But no one believed the damage could be undone quickly—if at all. “It was, in some ways, a postmortem,” said one person who listened to the call.

The passage of the Rescissions Act of 2025 marked the most sweeping rollback of public media funding in nearly six decades, gutting the infrastructure that supports more than fifteen hundred local radio and television stations. The consequences will fall hardest on rural and tribal stations, many of which rely on CPB for more than half their annual budgets.

“We have stations where the majority of their funding comes from CPB,” said Mollie Kabler, executive director of CoastAlaska, after it was clear Congress would be clawing the money back. “What the signal looks like in those communities remains to be seen.” For now, she said, CoastAlaska is entering a period of total restructuring, and is reviewing every part of its budget. “I’m assuming we’ll have to cut jobs, but I’m not sure which ones,” Kabler said. “It’s hard to do philanthropy and journalism without the funds for public media.” 

At KSTK, in Wrangell, Alaska, general manager Cindy Sweat is unsure what they’ll do next. “We’re already bare bones,” she said. “If we have to make cuts, there’s no easy choice.” Sweat said she was cautiously optimistic after hearing that Alaska station managers, including those in the CoastAlaska network, would meet Monday to craft a joint fundraising strategy. But local donations won’t be enough. “We’re a community of two thousand people,” Sweat said. “That includes everybody, kids to elders. Our listeners already support us generously. We can’t expect them to fill a deficit like this.”

Alaska’s dependence on public media seemed to present a flicker of hope for saving the funding earlier in the week, when Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from the state, posted on X about the essential role public radio stations had played in notifying residents of a possible tsunami, following a 7.3 magnitude earthquake. “Local residents and summer visitors alike were able to evacuate thanks to federal tsunami advisories relayed through local public broadcasting stations,” Murkowski wrote. “That’s the real world. But here in the US Senate, we are currently debating a rescissions package that would severely cut funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, drastically affecting Alaska’s 27 public media stations and many more across the nation.” Murkowski was one of two Republican senators to vote against the bill.

Another Republican senator, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, had appeared to be a possible vote against the cuts early in the week, owing to his concerns about funding for tribal stations. He reversed course on Tuesday, after the White House reportedly promised that Green New Deal funds would be repurposed to cover the gap. Tami Graham, the executive director of KSUT Tribal Radio in Colorado’s Four Corners region, is skeptical that such a deal will come through. “I lack confidence that Mike Rounds’s plan will be enacted,” she told CJR. “It’s no way to legislate, to do a backroom deal with the White House to get a senator’s vote. But that’s where we are in our country.”

Her doubts may be well-founded. A text message circulating from the office of Senator John Hickenlooper (D-Colorado), shared with CJR, indicates the carveout won’t come from the Green New Deal at all, but via a grant program overseen by the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Office of Indigenous Connectivity and Technology. (Unlike with CPB grants, which go directly to eligible stations, the new framework would require tribes to apply for competitive funding, with no timeline and no guarantee of success.)

KSUT has already been waiting six months for a FEMA grant—$500,000 for tower repairs—that has been stalled in bureaucratic limbo; the new cuts are “a second blow,” Graham said. “Tribal stations are the most vulnerable,” she added. “And this is such a minor Band-Aid. It’s not a serious plan. It’s a talking point.”

Even stations that rely on CPB for a smaller share of their budget are facing existential questions. At WDIY, in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley, 15 percent of the budget comes from CPB, said executive director Margaret McConnell. “That doesn’t sound like a lot, but we run a deficit every year.” What’s even harder to replace, she added, is what CPB provides beyond the money: “They pay for our music licensing, for example, which means our little station of five members doesn’t need to negotiate with industry giants.” 

Mitch Teich, station manager of North Country Public Radio in northern New York, echoed that concern. He estimates that CPB funding covers between 12 to 15 percent of NCPR’s budget—the money they use to pay for national programming that fills key gaps in their schedule. “We’re between a rock and a hard place if we lose the ability to play music on the radio,” Teich said. “I’m thinking of putting together a stand-up routine.”

For KSTK’s Sweat, what stings most is the disconnect between the rhetoric in Washington and the reality. “I hear senators say they want to defund NPR. But NPR gets about 1 percent of its funding from CPB. My station depends on CPB for more than half our budget.” Referring to the broadcasts of the tsunami warning this week, she added, “Stations like KUCB and KMXT were telling people to head to high ground. If those stations weren’t there, how would FEMA get the message out?”

Sweat went on, “There isn’t some big political agenda. We’re just the ones saying, ‘The tribal council is raising a totem pole this weekend,’ or ‘Someone lost their dog. Call us if you find it.’ That’s what we do.”

Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.