What the Dissolution of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Means

The parent organization of NPR and PBS, already defunded, is shutting down—and claims that’s for the best. But there are dangers ahead.

This week, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—which oversaw the distribution of federal funds to NPR, PBS, and a system of more than fifteen hundred local public media stations across the United States—moved to dissolve. CPB, as it’s known, a private, nonprofit entity established by Congress fifty-eight years ago, was defunded in July, as part of a sweeping plan guiding the Trump administration laid out by the Heritage Foundation in Project 2025. In a statement, CPB called the shutdown an act of “responsible stewardship,” since a “dormant and defunded CPB could have become vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse.” Patricia Harrison, the organization’s president and chief executive, said that the “CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks.”