The Corporation for Public Broadcasting blasts White House over deep cuts to funding

The White House released its 2019 budget proposal Monday, which calls for cuts to programs like Medicaid while boosting military spending and designating money for the border wall. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) would be hit especially hard, with President Trump's proposal rescinding "all but $15 million of each [fiscal year] 2019 and FY 2020 funding for public media," CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison wrote.

Harrison added that "the elimination of federal funding to CPB would at first devastate, and then ultimately destroy public media's ability to provide early childhood content, life-saving emergency alerts, and public affairs programs" and that "public media benefits all Americans — whether they live in small towns, rural communities, or large urban areas." CPB is the parent organization for programs like NPR and PBS.

Even with the White House's proposed cuts, "which combine for more than $3 trillion … over 10 years, it would not bring the budget into balance because of the lost tax revenue and higher spending on other programs," The Washington Post reports. Axios has deemed the White House's budget "science fiction" for the long odds it faces in Congress, and TVTechnology notes that "the president had previously proposed to zero out CPB's budget, as well as the National Endowment for the arts, for the FY 2018, but Congress voted down those parts of the proposal."

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