Vermont’s joint NPR and PBS station, Vermont Public, stands to lose about 10% of its annual funding if Congress signs off on President Donald Trump’s request to claw back funding the federal government provides for public media stations across the country. The measure passed the House earlier this month, and is now being considered in the Senate, where a hearing on the proposal is scheduled for Wednesday morning.
For Vermont Public, the potential funding cut — which would set the station back about $2 million a year — is unlikely to pose an existential threat, according to CEO Vijay Singh. The station relies less heavily on federal funding, he said, than many others around the country do. He added that Vermont Public’s leadership has done some initial “contingency planning,” though declined to specify, noting much was still up in the air.
Congress has until July 18 to make a decision on the president’s request.
Trump and his Republican allies in Congress backing the funding cut have framed it as an effort to divorce taxpayer money from news outlets they claim are biased. That criticism has led Singh and other public media leaders to make urgent appeals about the nature of their work in recent months — and landed the news stations in their own headlines.
Meanwhile, Singh said the proposed cuts have created significant uncertainty over whether public media in the U.S., which today operates as a closely-linked network of local stations sharing content and broadcast infrastructure, can continue in that form.
“It is very unclear what the world, after federal funding, looks like for public media,” he said in an interview Monday afternoon at Vermont Public’s studios in Colchester.
Like other public media stations, Vermont Public funds its programming in part with money appropriated by Congress to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a nonprofit run independently from the federal government, which then distributes the money to individual outlets — as well as to NPR and PBS at the national level.
At the beginning of June, Trump asked lawmakers to claw back about $1 billion in funding they have already appropriated to support public media stations across the country over the next two years. Through that process, formally known as a “recission” request, the White House also asked lawmakers to pull back more than $8 billion for foreign aid programs that address global public health and hunger relief.
Conservative activists have been pushing to eliminate federal funding for public media stations for decades. Previous Republican presidents, including Trump, during his first term, have tried to do so, though so far, none have convinced Congress to go along.
This year’s measure passed narrowly through the House, largely along party lines, with most — though not all — Republicans in support. House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said in a statement earlier this year that NPR and PBS have “consistently and knowingly betrayed the public trust” and “routinely ignore facts to advance a far left agenda.”
Singh acknowledged “a lot of people have that preconceived notion” that public media, especially at the national level, has a liberal bias. Vermont Public airs many nationally-syndicated NPR and PBS programs, though it also produces its own programs that focus on news and culture in Vermont and neighboring regions.
He said that notion largely stems from the stations’ charge to represent viewpoints that do not always make it into traditional, commercial media stories — meaning the stations’ content will, by design, avoid promoting any one set of views.
“We are not here to reinforce worldviews, and realistically, that’s how a lot of commercial media operates,” Singh said. Public media, he contended, is “going to challenge your worldview. And that is, I think, sometimes where the feedback that we get comes from.”
Vermont Public leans less on federal funding than many other public media stations around the country, particularly among rural states, Singh said. According to data from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, almost half of all rural stations rely on the feds for at least 25% of their revenue, while about 35 stations — many of them on Native American reservations — rely on the government for at least half of their revenue.
Just shy of 60% of Vermont Public’s revenue comes from individual donations and business sponsorships, according to the station’s latest annual report. In addition to that revenue and federal support, the report states, the station funds about 25% of its yearly operational costs with income from a substantial investment fund.
Much of that fund comes from the 2017 sale of a Vermont PBS broadcast license to the federal government, which totaled about $55 million. The public television station merged with Vermont Public Radio in 2021 under the combined name Vermont Public.
According to Singh, the investment fund provides a “cushion” that keeps Vermont Public from operating at a deficit, so the station’s leaders would be hesitant to dip into the fund further to support its operations in the event the station loses its federal funding.
Rather than turn to its investments, he said the station would likely launch a public fundraising campaign to make up the $2 million gap, if needed.
Singh said Vermont Public has been in regular contact with the state’s congressional delegation about the impacts of a potential funding cut. One of Vermont’s U.S. senators, Democrat Peter Welch, spoke against the rescission proposal on the Senate floor earlier this month, pointing to how, among other roles, public radio stations can be the only source of information available during a natural disaster.
Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark, also a Democrat, has signed onto a memo filed in support of two federal lawsuits challenging the proposed public media cuts. The amicus brief argues funding losses could curtail the spread of emergency information across the country, among other points. The suits were brought by NPR and PBS, as well as local stations in Colorado and Minnesota.
Public media stations provide “a source of local news at a time when we have news deserts all around the country, and the pressure on our local newspapers, on our local broadcasters, on our local radio stations is enormous,” Welch said on the Senate floor. “We need public broadcasting.”
