House Passes FY26 Appropriations Without Restoring Public Broadcasting Money

The House Rules Committee on Thursday morning voted 9-4, along party lines, against allowing a floor vote on an amendment led by Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., that would have allocated $100 million in grants for local public broadcasters to pay for construction and maintenance of “public telecommunications facilities.” Bacon had been trying to resurrect at least part of the rescinded $535 million in FY26 public broadcasting money as part of the appropriations process but encountered vehement opposition from the White House (see 2601080070). The House and Senate Appropriations committees last year advanced their respective Labor, Health and Human Services and Related Agencies subcommittees’ FY26 bills (HR-5304/S-2587) without any public broadcasting money (see 2507310062 and 2509100065).

Bacon proposed disbursing the $100 million for public broadcasters via the Commerce Department’s Public Telecommunications, Facilities, Planning and Construction program, which would have moved to the Department of Health and Human Services. Bacon said he was making the push because House GOP leaders promised last year to restore some funding in exchange for his vote to pass the 2025 Rescissions Act, which clawed it back (see 2506130025).

House Rules member Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., urged the panel to allow a floor vote on Bacon's amendment. She emphasized that she disagreed with merely pushing to give public broadcasters the facilities grants rather than to “restore funding for NPR and PBS. … But I do think it’s important for the House to have an open amendment process.” Scanlon argued that “House Republicans need to do some reflection. What does it say when you can’t get a vote on your amendment when you’re in the majority?” House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., “owes [Bacon] a vote” on his amendment, she said. “It’s the least he can do.”

President Donald Trump, who sought the rescission of the public broadcasting funding (see 2506030065), cited the clawback during a press conference Tuesday as one of his administration’s accomplishments since he returned to office a year ago. Trump inaccurately said the rescission meant that the “woke and biased NPR and PBS [are] sort of gone now. They were terrible. They were so unfair. It was so terrible.” The rescinded funding would have gone to CPB, which doled out allocations to NPR, PBS and their local affiliates. CPB formally disbanded earlier this month (see 2601050043).

The House’s unanimous vote to attach a repeal of the Senate-only phone surveillance lawsuit statute appeared likely to force the upper chamber to act after senators chose to ignore HR-6019. Senate Homeland Security Committee ranking member Gary Peters, D-Mich., as recently as last week unsuccessfully tried to seek the repeal by unanimous consent. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., blocked that attempt. The Senate pursued the lawsuit language following reports that the FBI and former Special Counsel Jack Smith accessed phone records of several Republicans without notice as part of the Arctic Frost probe of the Jan. 6 Capitol siege (see 2510170039).

Smith drew House Judiciary Committee Republicans’ ire during a hearing Thursday over the surveillance and pursuit of nondisclosure orders that prevented lawmakers from knowing about the subpoenas. Rep. Brandon Gill, R-Texas, argued that Smith used “clearly false information to secure a nondisclosure order to hide from [former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif.] and the American people the fact that you were spying on his toll records.”

Smith said “the risks” that drew him to pursue nondisclosure “aren't necessarily associated with the subscriber to the phone. The risks are to the investigation.” He “was aware, during the course of our investigation, of targeting of witnesses during the course of the [Jan. 6] conspiracy itself.” There “were election workers who had their lives turned upside down and received vile death threats because they were targeted by [Trump] and his co-conspirators,” Smith said.