House Rules Members Spar on Rescissions Bill's Clawback of Advance CPB Funding
The House Rules Committee was still considering Tuesday whether to allow floor votes on a pair of Democratic amendments to the 2025 Rescissions Act (HR-4) that would strip out its proposed clawback of $1.1 billion of CPB’s advance funding for FY 2026 and FY 2027 (see 2506090036). Panel Republicans and Democrats sparred over CPB funding during the hearing, reflecting growing GOP interest in revoking federal support for public broadcasters over claims that their content has a predominantly pro-Democratic bias (see 2503210040). Meanwhile, Sen. Mike Rounds, R-S.D., told us he's still undecided about supporting a CPB funding rollback once the upper chamber considers HR-4.
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Rounds said he has questions about how rescinding CPB’s funding could affect South Dakota’s “Native American populations, who really rely on public radio for emergency services and so forth,” an issue he raised last week after President Donald Trump sent his rescissions request to Congress (see 2506040060). Rounds said he wants to “ensure that … we don’t leave [Native Americans] hanging” by revoking the public broadcasting money.
Both of the proposed CPB-focused amendments to HR-4 would excise the entirety of the $1.1 billion clawback. Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, co-chairman of the Congressional Public Broadcasting Caucus, is leading one of the proposals with House Communications Subcommittee ranking member Doris Matsui of California and seven other Democrats. Rep. Julie Johnson, D-Texas, is leading an identical amendment.
House Rules Chair Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., on Tuesday criticized NPR and PBS, the major public broadcasting networks that CPB funds. “Even if someone were to accept the premise that we need to finance a public radio outlet, certainly we can all agree that it simply cannot be NPR any longer,” she said during the hearing. Foxx criticized NPR CEO Katherine Maher's testimony at a House Oversight Delivering on Government Efficiency Subcommittee hearing in March (see 2503260063) “that she's never seen any political bias at NPR.”
Foxx also cited what she called “concrete, statistically proven bias against conservatives” at PBS. “We have Sesame Street now streaming on private services, so the taxpayer is now subsidizing for-profit companies,” she said. “We've seen [celebrities] who are engaged in crossovers with Sesame Street [in a way that] leverages taxpayer dollars to concentrate wealth to private individuals.” Rep. Michelle Fischbach, R-Minn., gave examples of what she called objectionable public broadcasting content that do “not sound like children's programming to me. That sounds like a political agenda, [and] the American people are fed up with it.”
Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., pushed back against criticisms that rescinding CPB’s funding would “be kneecapping [Sesame Street character] Big Bird.” CPB “is not the … emergency alert system,” he said. “Big Bird is not owned by PBS, [and] Jim Henson Productions is a separate entity.” Congress “might be setting Big Bird free” by defunding CPB, Griffith said. “Big Bird might make more money being set free to go into the private market area whenever their contract is up with PBS, and may be able to get more money nationally and internationally when they are set free.”
Democrats Criticize
House Rules ranking member Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said Republicans “want to go after Sesame Street. I mean, what the hell is wrong with this place?” Debate on HR-4 is “a discussion about values and morals and what is important,” he told Rep. Rob Aderholt, R-Ala., House Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Subcommittee chairman. “How can you justify eliminating funding for public TV and radio, which millions of Americans rely on ... when Republicans are taking these savings to give a big tax cut for gun silencers?”
House Appropriations Committee ranking member Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said this “is a bill to shut down rural television and radio stations, cutting off coverage of local news, eliminating emergency information like severe weather alerts, jeopardizing access to PBS Kids children's programming like Sesame Street and Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.” House Rules member Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., said Republicans “have been trying to kill Big Bird and [Sesame Street character] Cookie Monster for over 30 years, and now Trump would like to actually do it in this bill.”
Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Colo., faulted Aderholt for voting for a continuing resolution in March that extended funding for CPB into FY27 (see 2503170058). As LHHS chairman, “you have the power to say, ‘I'm not going to vote to appropriate money for public television because I disagree with it,' or 'I think it's waste, I think it's fraud,'” Neguse said. “You don't have to go through this entire process of sort of kabuki theater, where you appropriate billions of dollars and send them to the administration only so the administration can come back and tell you now that those funds should be rescinded.”
Aderholt acknowledged that rescinding CPB’s advance funding would lead to a 13% cut in Alabama public broadcasters’ money. “I am voting for the package” as a whole, he told Neguse. “Alabama [public TV] has done a good job with some of the things they've done, [but] unfortunately, they're in the package with all the others” that have produced more problematic content.