Yes, Project 2025 does call for defunding NPR and PBS

Voters are paying more attention to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to transform the federal government during the next conservative administration, as election day draws closer. VERIFY has received dozens of reader questions about Project 2025.

Deborah emailed us to ask if Project 2025 really calls for the government to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides federal funding for NPR and PBS.

THE QUESTION

Does Project 2025 call for the government to defund NPR and PBS?

THE SOURCES

• Project 2025’s comprehensive policy guide “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise”

• Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)

• National Public Radio (NPR)

• PBS spokesperson

THE ANSWER

Yes, Project 2025 does call for the government to defund NPR and PBS.

WHAT WE FOUND

Project 2025 is based on a comprehensive policy guide titled “Mandate for Leadership:  The Conservative Promise" written by The Heritage Foundation in 2023.

Chapter 8 of that policy guide is on media agencies. Within that chapter is a section dedicated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which the guide says would be “good policy and good politics” to stop public funding.

The CPB is a private, nonprofit corporation fully funded by the federal government, according to the CPB. It is the largest single source of funding for public radio and television, which includes NPR, PBS, Latino Public Broadcasting and many more organizations. The CPB does not produce or distribute programs, nor does it own or operate any broadcast stations.

PBS is a private, nonprofit media enterprise owned by its member public television stations, while NPR is a nonprofit membership organization of separately licensed and operated public radio stations, the CPB says. 

The CPB supports both PBS and NPR with grants. CPB grants support PBS’ content and infrastructure to distribute that content and emergency alerts to public television stations. CPB’s grants to NPR support its international reporting bureaus and the infrastructure that distributes NPR content to public radio stations.

Mike Gonzalez, the author of the section on the CPB in Project 2025’s policy guide, argues that both NPR and PBS have a more liberal bias, and that the “government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views.” Gonzalez also argues that the federal government cannot afford to spend half a billion dollars “on leftist opinion” each year because it is trillions of dollars in debt.

Gonzalez says the next conservative president should attempt to defund the CPB through the annual appropriations process, which sets the budget of the federal government each year after Congress passes it and the president signs it. 

In the Project 2025 policy guide, Gonzalez writes that public media would survive without federal dollars from the CPB.

“Defunding CPB would by no means cause NPR or PBS—or other public broadcasters that benefit from CPB funding, including the even-further-to-the Left Pacifica Radio and American Public Media—to file for bankruptcy,” Gonzalez claims. “The membership model that the CPB uses, along with the funding from corporations and foundations that it also receives, would allow these broadcasters to continue to thrive.”

According to NPR, 8% of public radio station revenues came from federal appropriations through the CPB. A PBS spokesperson said federal funding makes up 15% of the budget across all of public television.