To paraphrase Douglas Adams, “This weekend Congress defunded the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. This had made many people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.” My relation with Oregon Public Broadcasting is complicated. I love listening to NPR. I enjoy watching PBS, have since I was a toddler. I do not believe their news content is free of bias, but I enjoy hearing opinions other than my own.
Working with OPB during my time as a broadcaster was a mixed bag. Once hiking on a snow-capped mountain surveying telecommunications sites, I failed to bring enough water and quickly found myself dehydrated. OPB engineers driving by in their Sno-Cat gave me and my companion Forest Ranger water bottles, and we arrived back at our cars refreshed. Unfortunately, I frequently found OPB’s management to be slow to respond to critical administrative matters, and old meeting minutes showed a history of troubling workmanship allegations between the station and my old employer.
Despite my personal experience with OPB, I believe they provide important public services to Americans. Rural and tribal public radio stations funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are often designated as Primary Entry Points in the Emergency Alert System. They broadcast critical alerts, such as Amber and Silver Alerts, especially in areas with limited internet or mobile coverage. In many rural regions, public broadcasting is often the only local news source, filling critical information needs where commercial media and broadband access are sparse. Native Public Media supports around 57 tribal stations reliant on CPB, providing local news, cultural programming, and emergency messaging; these stations are often the only broadcasters in those areas.
Defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has been supported by some as a method for reducing the federal deficit. This is in fact impossible to do without cutting Social Security, Medicare, or the Department of Defense. Entitlements, of course, are the people’s money, and repurposing those funds in the name of deficit reduction is tantamount to theft. Cutting the military sounds dangerous on its face, until the financial facts are considered.
During the Pentagon’s first audit in 2018, auditors found that the Defense Logistics Agency could not account for over $800 million in receipts. Defense contractors, private companies, raked in nearly $1 billion without providing any information about the purpose of their projects or their legality. This is just a fraction of trillions of dollars the DOD has lost since 1996. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting received just $445 million in 2020, all audited and accounted for in their finance reports, as well as their affiliates across the United States of America. The problem with the federal deficit clearly does not lie with the home of Arthur, Odd Squad, and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. Instead of holding the military-industrial complex accountable, Congress increased the Pentagon’s from $700 billion in 2018 to $850 billion while disrupting one of America’s greatest public safety assets.
I am a fiscal conservative. I like my government lean, efficient, and responsible. The military-industrial complex, just as President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us, is as far from fiscally conservative as possible. PBS, NPR, and affiliates like OPB may air content perceived as biased toward the left, but they operate with powerful financial efficiency that serves and protects the public. Congress should be cutting funding for bureaucrats and private companies that could be saved or better spent supporting our service members. Until that happens, defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is about the least fiscally responsible method for reducing the federal deficit.
Editor’s Note
Alex McHaddad is a sustaining member of Oregon Public Broadcasting as of July 2025.
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