Last summer, Asia Burnett was staring into a financial abyss.
President Donald Trump was urging Congress to wipe out almost all federal funding of public broadcasting — some $1.1 billion in subsidies. Like many Republicans had before him, Trump demonized PBS and NPR as biased against conservatives. But the “rescission,” or formal clawing back of funds appropriated by a previous Congress, would be a historic reversal: the first time Washington had withdrawn the financial support that had built and sustained the national network of educational and local programming for almost six decades.
For Burnett and WKMS, the public radio station she manages in southwestern Kentucky, the specter of defunding was an ominous prospect. Burnett counted on the federally chartered Corporation for Public Broadcasting — the nonprofit that distributed federal funds to local television and radio stations nationwide — to provide $215,000 a year, or about 15 percent of the station’s annual budget. In a region where the per capita income is barely $30,000, Burnett worried that sponsors and listeners wouldn’t have the means to fill the gap. “That’s a lot of money for a small, rural station to lose,” she said recently. “It was a large hit.”
The hammer, as feared, dropped last July, when Congress passed and Trump signed the Rescissions Act of 2025. Within two weeks, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it would begin winding down operations. Media observers warned that stations like WKMS might shutter in mass numbers.
But then the unexpected happened: The tidal wave of closures never materialized. Across the country, “rage giving” by everyday supporters fueled by anger over Washington's actions and donations from large philanthropies such as the Knight Foundation and Public Media Bridge Fund produced an unlikely safety net — sums significant enough to not only stave off collapse of the public media system but even help expand it in some places. In the wake of an existential funding crisis, public broadcasters dodged a bullet. Mergers between public broadcasters and digital news outlets have also helped maintain original reporting in areas otherwise at risk of becoming news deserts. The question now: Will the surge in support that materialized after the rescission last beyond this year?
All the Rage
In Kentucky, WKMS listeners stepped up, donating more than $900,000 in the months following the federal wipeout. One donor contributed $250,000, but money came from all corners of the community, from supermarket cashiers to farmers. The outpouring amounted to roughly two-and-a-half times the station’s typical annual fundraising total, more than covering what Washington had previously provided. Burnett was able to maintain WKMS’s full-time staff of eight and even added to the station’s endowment. Relieved and humbled, Burnett thinks the response was in part a validation of the station’s commitment to original reporting. “I think it shows how important local journalism is,” she said. “Journalism is always changing, but this speaks to how people still need a trusted source, a trusted voice.”
Elsewhere, public media organizations evaded calamity by stepping up fundraising drives that highlighted the impending federal cutoff. WFAE of Charlotte, for example, emphasized in its appeals that its local news reporting would be entirely reliant on community support after Washington acted. As a result, many stations bracing for the worst instead reported rising contributions from listeners and viewers, especially in the months immediately after the federal clawback. Over the past year, revenue rose an average of 44 percent at 170 public stations surveyed by Contributor Development Partnership, a research organization that analyzes fundraising at public radio and television stations.
The flood of money has cushioned the impact of federal cuts for some but certainly not all in the patchwork of large and small radio and television stations that constitute public broadcasting. Dozens of rural stations in sparsely populated regions remain at risk due to their disproportionate dependence on federal funds. For decades, taxpayer money channeled through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) accounted for 40 percent or more of these stations’ operating budgets, making possible programs like daily Alaska Native newscasts on KNBA-FM in Anchorage and Navajo and Zuni community news on KGLP-FM in Gallup, New Mexico. Lacking the broad and wealthier donor bases of their big-city cousins, such stations remain in existential peril.
In some places, however, public broadcasting has shown surprising resilience. The outpouring of support is sometimes referred to as rage giving. “The end of federal funding was an incredibly dramatic event,” said Alex Curley, executive director of Semipublic, which tracks and analyzes data about public media. “People were motivated to give.”
Oregon Public Broadcasting, which operates five TV and 20 radio stations across that state and southern Washington, lost $5 million, or about 9 percent of its overall budget last year. But an increase in donations “more than covered” that shortfall, said CEO Rachel Smolkin, who declined to provide specific figures. Smolkin, who helped build CNN’s digital news operations and was an editor at Politico and USA Today before joining Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2024, has used the contributions to add four journalists to the staff. She says the kind of news and other information public stations provide — free to all and usually of high quality — is critical to converting rage-givers into “sustainers,” public-media-speak for regular contributors.
Extending the Bridge
As gratifying as the public reaction has been for some organizations, many in public media worry that the post-rescission rage is like a sugar spike, bound to dissipate.
There are already worrying signs that tougher times lie ahead. Overall, the federal cuts, coupled with declining support by some state governments, has led to about 550 layoffs among public media organizations, or about 3 percent of total workforce, according to Semipublic’s tracking. Many of the cuts have affected newsgathering. NPR let go 10 journalists in May and offered buyouts to 18 others. WETA, a major TV program producer based in suburban Washington, D.C., cut its staff by 10 percent in the fall of 2025 and canceled production of the weekend edition of “NewsHour.” WGBH in Boston, which produces the public TV staples “Frontline” and “Antiques Roadshow,” eliminated 15 positions after losing federal funds. A handful of stations have dropped their affiliations with PBS and NPR to save money on annual program fees, and some have canceled national news and informational programming for the same reason. Local news remains vulnerable. After losing almost half of its budget, KEET-TV, a PBS-affiliated station serving California’s rural Humboldt County, canceled its “Headline Humboldt” newscast and slashed its payroll from 13 people to six.
Some federal funding losses have been cushioned by a major philanthropic effort, organized by the nonprofit Public Media Bridge Fund, which aggregates charitable contributions from donors such as the Knight Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation and Mellon Foundation. Since August 2025, the fund has directed some $26 million in emergency “stabilization” grants and loans to stations in the most financially precarious positions; it has also offered consulting advice. (Separately, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs said last year it would provide grants totaling $9.4 million to 35 stations operated by Native American organizations.)
These large-scale efforts highlight both how fragile many public stations’ finances were and how vital their mission is: Most of the philanthropic and government grantees, such as KCAW, in remote Sitka, Alaska, would be unable to get by solely on community support. The Public Media Bridge Fund estimates that as many as 115 public TV and radio stations were at risk of collapse due to the loss of federal money. The loss of so many stations would have been calamitous in its own right but also likely would have added to the expansion of news deserts in about 10 counties where public radio is the sole remaining professional news source. Many stations remain “significantly vulnerable,” said Erik Langner, executive director of the bridge fund. But Langner offers an optimistic coda: Some 1,500 donors, led by the Knight Foundation and other institutions, have committed $86 million, ensuring at least some continuity in the years to come.
Stabilizing Through Collaborations
With the long-term outlook still unclear in many areas, it’s likely that some strategies public media organizations have employed for the past decade will continue and may even accelerate. A number of stations — in St. Louis, Los Angeles, Washington and New York, among other cities — have merged with digital news organizations in recent years to share costs and offer more extensive coverage. For instance, Chicago Public Media, the parent of WBEZ, purchased the Chicago Sun-Times in 2022, transforming the venerable newspaper into a nonprofit.
One of the latest public media mergers involves San Antonio-based Texas Public Radio, which operates seven stations across the south-central part of the state. It announced in May that it would combine with San Antonio Report, a digital news organization. The deal was under discussion before the rescission, said Ashley Alvarado, Texas Public Radio’s chief executive, but cost concerns and the need for financial stability were driving factors.
“The reality across local journalism is that resources are tight, philanthropic dollars are competitive and audiences are fragmented,” Alvarado said. The combination brought together Texas Public Radio’s expertise in audio news with San Antonio Report’s digital chops, creating a newsroom of 31 journalists while reducing administrative overhead. “The goal wasn’t just to save a dollar today,” she said. “It was to build an organization with the scale and resilience to sustain robust, independent local reporting … for decades to come.” The merger also implicitly recognizes that public broadcasting long ago stopped being only about on-air broadcasting and now includes such digital-era staples as podcasts, newsletters and TikTok videos.
The same cooperative rationale has fueled the expanding number of regional news collectives, which draw on the work of several independently owned public stations and are explicitly designed to fill the gaps left by the disappearance of for-profit news organizations, particularly newspapers. The Texas Newsroom, founded in 2019, was the prototype for NPR’s “Collaborative Journalism Network,” a series of resource-sharing hubs composed of local journalists at public stations. The Texas experiment started with four big stations (including Alvarado’s in San Antonio) and has since expanded to 20 contributing stations across the state. The network, which shares stories within the state as well as with NPR nationally, focuses on state politics and policy, immigration and border issues, education, health, and climate news, among other topics. NPR has since replicated the Texas model to a three-state region of the South, as well as in California, the Midwest, New England, Appalachia and the Mountain West.
One cost-effective model for such collaborations may be the Florida Public Radio Emergency Network, which since 2013 has delivered public-safety and severe weather alerts throughout the state via 14 stations and their websites and social media accounts. In addition to the network’s life-saving utility — radio is typically the last reliable news source disabled by natural disasters — one attraction is the low cost: The state of Florida, which fully funds the service, will spend just $256,270 on its operations this year, according to Randy Wright, the general manager of WUFT, the University of Florida-owned station that is the lead partner in the network.
Such collaborative efforts not only produce valuable daily coverage but also have become a source of more ambitious journalism. A recent series by Oregon Public Broadcasting, produced in cooperation with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, won the $15,000 Goldsmith Prize for Explanatory Reporting this year. The series revealed how administrative snafus and political disputes had thwarted the development of renewable-energy projects in Oregon and Washington.
What’s next?
But the post-rescission era may require more than innovation, collaboration and philanthropy. The number of public broadcasting stations and organizations is bound to shrink, suggests Langner of the Public Media Bridge Fund. “The system will have fewer [originating] organizations” in the future, he said. Notably, more than half of public radio stations and about a quarter of public TV stations are owned by colleges and universities, many of which are facing their own financial problems due to a looming “enrollment cliff” and declining state support.
Already, signs of trouble are appearing. An index of new donors maintained by Contributor Development Partnership showed a 16 percent decline in July, the first such decrease since the rescission. The fundraising partnership said quarterly growth in donations is “beginning to normalize” after the rescission-driven surge. With public broadcasting out of the spotlight, audience rage, and rage giving, may be difficult to sustain.
If the trend continues, public broadcasters could find themselves in the hole many anticipated when Trump and Congress acted in the summer of 2025. At the moment, “it’s not the imminent crisis that everyone thought it would be a year ago,” said Curley, who projects that public and philanthropic donations will enable stations to get by for the next two years. But after that is anyone’s guess. “It doesn’t mean the crisis has been resolved,” he added. “It just means it’s delayed.”
