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Opinion
Defunding Public Media Makes Perfect Sense If Destroying Democracy Is the Goal
The Trump purge of federal spending is about stripping our democratic system of all accountability mechanisms—including the sorts of journalism that hold our country’s rich and powerful accountable—and replacing it with propaganda.
Jul 18, 2025
U.S. Congress’ decision early Friday morning to completely defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is a blow to anyone who cares about the role the media must play to sustain the health of a democracy. The move follows a request by President Donald Trump to claw back more than $1 billion lawmakers had already allocated to the entity, which supports National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Service stations across the country.
Zeroing out federal funding for public media has been a dream of Republicans since the Nixon administration. But it’s one that, until now, never came true. Past efforts ran up against a noisy public—including people of every political persuasion—who believe federal funding for public media is taxpayer money well spent.
Many were engaged in the current fight, too; they dialed their members of Congress by the thousands to urge them to preserve essential funding for favorite local radio and television stations. But Republican members of Congress chose to listen to their Dear Leader instead. The week prior to the rescission vote, Trump threatened to withhold his “support or endorsement” in upcoming elections to any Republican who didn’t back the clawback. And with far too few exceptions Republicans willingly got in line
Clearing a Path for Destruction
The loss of CPB funding will be felt for years. “This is a vote to evade public accountability and hide the Trump administration’s destructive actions from independent scrutiny,” Free Press Action co-CEO Craig Aaron said.
It won’t be easy to rebuild what Trump has ruined, but we must because the health of our democracy depends on having independent public media. And the less than $2 per person that U.S. taxpayers willingly paid to fund the CPB was paltry by comparison with what other modern democracies spend on their own public media.
Congress is acting on the false belief that the November 2024 election—which Trump won with less than a majority of the popular vote—delivered them a mandate to remake the federal government in the president’s autocratic image.
The benefits in this public-interest equation far outweighed any expense. They include essential educational programming, invaluable accountability journalism, and the broadcast of emergency information.
As senators debated Trump’s defunding request on July 16, a 7.3-magnitude earthquake struck the Alaska Peninsula, prompting rural and island-bound public-radio stations to issue tsunami alerts to affected listeners throughout the region. It’s these rural stations that rely the most on public funds to air potentially lifesaving updates during emergencies and their aftermath.
Still, Congress is acting on the false belief that the November 2024 election—which Trump won with less than a majority of the popular vote—delivered them a mandate to remake the federal government in the president’s autocratic image, regardless of the costs.
Public Media Benefits Democracy
And those costs are very high. The Trump purge of federal spending is not just about downsizing the government so billionaires won’t have to pay their fair share in taxes. It’s about stripping our democratic system of all accountability mechanisms—including the sorts of journalism that hold our country’s rich and powerful accountable—and replacing it with propaganda.
If anything has a popular mandate, it’s the use of federal funds to support public media. Americans routinely rank PBS among the most trusted institutions in the country, and a “most valuable” service taxpayers receive for their money.
These benefits accrue to our democratic system. A 2021 study coauthored by University of Pennsylvania professor (and Free Press board chair) Victor Pickard finds that more robust funding for public media strengthens a given country’s democracy—with increased public knowledge about civic affairs, more diverse media coverage, and lower levels of extremist views. Other studies strongly suggest that declines in such local news and information lead to drops in civic engagement.
There’s reasonable criticism of the public-broadcasting system that had been in place since President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. For example, CPB needed to offer more support to the proliferation of local noncommercial outlets serving communities too often overlooked by legacy commercial media. In addition, tax laws need to better accommodate local commercial news outlets seeking to shift their fiscal models to not-for-profit.
But we should build these changes on the foundation the CPB has established over the decades. That foundation has been swept away by a leader who cares far more about himself than the health of our nation.
Rebuilding at the State and Local Levels
It’s hard to find a silver lining to such a dark cloud. If any exists it’s in the energy and organizing for better public media at state and local levels.
New Jersey just re-upped its commitment to fund the Civic Information Consortium, a groundbreaking state-level effort that supports trustworthy, community-based news and information sources throughout the state.
These solutions are needed in addition to a federal mechanism for funding public media, not in place of it.
Local lawmakers in other states—including California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Washington—are advancing policy solutions that increase public support for and access to nonpartisan and independent local news. Noncommercial media—including existing outlets like Capital & Main, City Bureau, LAist, Mississippi Today, Outlier Media and ProPublica—are offering an antidote to a hyper-commercial media system that is too fearful of political leadership (and protective of profit margins) to act as a check against official abuses of power.
One possible solution is to impose a small tax on advertising to fund the production and distribution of local news and civic information, something Free Press has long advocated for.
But these solutions are needed in addition to a federal mechanism for funding public media, not in place of it. We still need to mobilize behind efforts to restore the CPB or a similar entity to that role. The goal—building a media system that serves the interests of the American people, and not those of a unitary executive—is vital to saving our democracy.
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Trump’s Purge of Civil Servants Is a Direct Attack on Civil Rights—And Democracy Itself
The dismantling of our rights relies on complacency—we must begin to organize protests, strikes, and direct aid to affected communities starting immediately.
Jul 18, 2025
The U.S. Supreme Court just handed President Donald Trump a blank check to dismantle the federal government—and with it, the last safeguards for civil rights in America.
In an unsigned order last Tuesday, the justices allowed the Trump administration to proceed with mass federal layoffs and agency closures, overriding lower courts that had ruled these moves unconstitutional.
The consequences will be immediate and devastating. For example, the Department of Education’s (DOE) workforce will be cut by half and Trump’s executive order to commence the closure of the federal agency is now enforceable. Among the first departments to face reductions? Nearly half the staff at the Office for Civil Rights. Seven of its regional offices—including busy ones in major hubs like New York, Chicago, and Dallas—have been shuttered. Thousands of pending civil rights cases will now hang in limbo.
This attack on the DOE—and the nearly 60,000 other workers purged from federal agencies this year under the Trump administration—aren’t just another round of bureaucratic belt-tightening; they’re a deliberate attack on our civil rights and on the only watchdogs in the federal government left that can stop Donald Trump’s authoritarian overreach.
Rolling back the gains of the civil rights era is precisely the point.
As a former civil rights attorney at the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights, I’ve seen firsthand how the oversight from civil servants at federal agencies has safeguarded marginalized communities. In my eight years as a civil rights attorney, I worked with other civil servants to ensure that every child in America—regardless of their background or circumstance—saw equal treatment and opportunity in their education. We were the last line of defense to ensure that students of color, women, LGBTQ+ youth, and disabled students’ rights were protected and anti-discrimination laws were enforced.
But now, with these attacks from the Trump administration, that enforcement will be severely weakened, if not done away with completely. What’s more, civil rights oversight isn’t just a casualty of cuts at the DOE; it’s every federal agency.
The Department of Homeland Security recently implemented a “reduction in force” for three key offices that oversee civil rights protections, including the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The Social Security Administration recently announced it was closing its Office of Civil Rights and Equal Opportunity, where about 150 people worked investigating civil rights complaints. And, the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division has been frozen.
These attacks are not only morally reprehensible—they are outright unconstitutional. By dismantling agencies established by acts of Congress and diverting funds from congressionally mandated programs, Trump is violating the separation of powers and usurping authority that the Constitution explicitly grants to the legislative branch.
And make no mistake: Rolling back the gains of the civil rights era is precisely the point—Trump’s white nationalist supporters want to return America to a mythical white, Christian past. These interests just so happen to align with the Trump-backing billionaires for whom cutting public services frees up funds for lucrative tax cuts.
The issue is compounded by the fact that these cuts simultaneously do away with the last watchdogs left in the federal government who would be able to push back against this type of unconstitutional overreach attacking our civil rights.
When I worked in the DOE, I witnessed firsthand in President Trump’s first term how civil servants worked as a last line of defense against Trump’s authoritarian assault on our democracy. Although often maligned by the right as “deep-state” actors, these nonpartisan civil servants who acted on their oath to the Constitution—rather than any president—leaked damaging information and resisted unlawful orders, significantly stymieing the first Trump administration’s agenda. Their effectiveness was illustrated clearly by how this time around Project 2025 made their removal a high priority via Schedule F, which reclassifies nonpartisan roles as political appointees.
As these workforce reductions go into effect, the administration has simultaneously instituted loyalty screenings—ensuring anyone hired is loyal MAGA to the core and that only ideologues will remain. The result? There is no one left to investigate when our civil rights are being violated—and there is no one left to push back to prevent them from doing so in the first place.
The courts will not save us—that much is clear. And we all know what returning these functions to the state looks like: the Jim Crow era, where states, particularly red states, turned their back on civil rights and instead entered into a new reign of terror. But the dismantling of our rights relies on complacency—we must begin to organize protests, strikes, and direct aid to affected communities starting immediately.
If we wish to defend the civil rights of Black people and other communities of color, the LGBTQ+ community, women and children, and the millions of us who aren’t part of the top 1% and defend our democracy from Trump’s authoritarian attacks, we must become ungovernable now and resist every chance we get.
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Six Months Into His Presidency, Trump Has Created a Global Humanitarian Catastrophe
The question now facing other world leaders is stark: will they continue to capitulate to Trump’s unilateralism, or will they stand up and defend multilateralism and international solidarity?
Jul 18, 2025
As the UN’s independent expert on poverty, I am no stranger to harrowing statistics. But few numbers have shaken me like those emerging in the wake of the Trump administration’s suspension of U.S. foreign aid. According to new estimates published in The Lancet, these funding cuts could result in more than 14 million deaths by 2030, a third of them young children.
These deaths will not be the result of droughts, earthquakes, pandemics, or war. They will be the direct consequence of a single, lethal decision made by one of the wealthiest men to ever walk this planet.
On his first day back in the White House, President Donald Trump handed a death sentence to millions of people. Hours after taking office on January 20, 2025, he signed Executive Order 14169, ordering a pause on billions of dollars of foreign aid under the guise of a “90-day review” to ensure aid was aligned with his “America First” approach.
Six months later, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been dissolved, and the entirety of America’s global humanitarian aid workforce will be terminated over the summer. The findings of the “review” have not been published.
What was billed as a temporary policy reassessment has transformed over the first half of 2025 into a full-blown humanitarian emergency.
Until the U.S. State Department releases a full assessment report, one can only conclude that the decisions to suspend foreign aid and subsequently dismantle USAID were made in an environment of zero transparency, zero accountability, and with no clear justification for a decision that will ultimately cost millions of lives.
What was billed as a temporary policy reassessment has transformed over the first half of 2025 into a full-blown humanitarian emergency. Estimates put the death toll since the aid freeze was announced at nearly 350,000 people—more than 200,000 of them children. All of these deaths were entirely preventable.
USAID and additional cuts to the UN and its agencies mean the UN faces the gravest threat to its existence in its 80-year history. UNFPA, the UN's reproductive health agency, estimates 32 million people will lose access to its services. UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, warns that 12.8 million displaced people are at risk of losing life-saving health interventions. The International Organization for Migration projects 10 million migrants and internally displaced people will miss out on emergency assistance.
The retreat may feel politically convenient, but the consequences will not stay confined to distant borders.
We are numbed by numbers. “One death is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic,” the saying goes. But these are our fellow humans—right now—suffering and dying. Children refused food. Refugees denied life-saving care after fleeing the horrors of war. Mothers bleeding to death during childbirth. All because the United States, once the backbone of the global humanitarian system, has suddenly turned off the tap.
America has abandoned the fight against poverty. But what does it mean to put America first while letting children elsewhere starve to death? The retreat may feel politically convenient, but the consequences will not stay confined to distant borders. When food systems collapse, migration spikes. When vaccines are cut off, disease spreads. When aid disappears, conflict grows. There is no version of global instability in which the U.S. remains unscathed.
No other country is stepping in to fill the void left by the United States. On the contrary, many are following suit, redirecting money once earmarked for life-saving development programmes—initiatives that ultimately build a safer, more stable world–towards defense spending.
These decisions are not just budgetary shifts; they represent a fundamental threat to multilateralism and the international rules-based order that has kept the world from the brink of world war for well over half a century.
The question now facing other world leaders is stark: will they continue to capitulate to Trump’s unilateralism, or will they stand up and defend multilateralism and international solidarity, including financial support, as our only safeguard against chaos, endless conflict, and unnecessary human suffering?
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What Can We Learn From the Birth of the Nuclear Era?
The history serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.
Jul 18, 2025
In recent months, nuclear weapons have reemerged in global headlines. Nuclear-armed rivals India and Pakistan approached the brink of a full-scale war, a confrontation that could have become an extinction-level event, with the potential to claim up to 2 billion lives worldwide.
The instability of a global order structured on nuclear apartheid has also come into sharp relief in the context of the recent attacks on Iran by Israel and the United States. That system has entrenched a dangerous double standard, creating perverse incentives for the proliferation of world-destroying weaponry, already possessed by nine countries. Many of those nations use their arsenals to exercise imperial impunity, while non-nuclear states increasingly feel compelled to pursue nuclear weapons in the name of national security and survival.
Meanwhile, the largest nuclear powers show not the slightest signs of responsibility or restraint. The United States, Russia, and China are investing heavily in the “modernization” and expansion of their arsenals, fueling a renewed arms race. And that escalation comes amid growing global instability contributing to a Manichean world of antagonistic armed blocs, reminiscent of the Cold War at its worst.
The nuclear threat endangers not only global peace and security but the very continuity of the human species, not to speak of the simple survival of life on Earth. How, you might wonder, could we ever have arrived at such a precarious situation?
The current crisis coincides with the 80th anniversary of the Trinity Test, the first detonation of an atomic weapon that would soon obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and so inaugurate the atomic age. So many years later, it’s worth critically reassessing the decisions that conferred on humanity such a power of self-annihilation. After all, we continue to live with the fallout of the choices made (and not made), including those of the scientists who created the bomb. That history also serves as a reminder that alternative paths were available then and that another world remains possible today.
A Tale of Two Laboratories
In the summer of 1945, scientists and technicians at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico worked feverishly to complete the construction of the atomic bomb. Meanwhile, their colleagues at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory mounted a final, ultimately unsuccessful effort to prevent its use.
The alarm spreading in Chicago stemmed from a sobering realization. The Manhattan Project that they had joined on the basis of a belief that they were in an existential arms race with Nazi Germany had, by then, revealed itself to be a distinctly one-sided contest. Until then, the specter of a possible German atomic bomb had conferred a sense of urgency and a veneer of moral legitimacy on what many scientists otherwise recognized as a profoundly unethical undertaking.
Prior to the fall of Berlin, Allied intelligence had already begun to cast serious doubt on Germany’s progress toward developing an atomic weapon. By April 1945, with the Nazi regime in a state of collapse and Japan’s defeat imminent, the threat that served as the original justification for the bomb’s development had all but vanished.
While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future.
No longer represented as a plausible deterrent, the bomb now stood poised to become what Los Alamos Director J. Robert Oppenheimer would describe shortly after the war as “weapons of terror, of surprise, of aggression… [used] against an essentially defeated enemy.”
By that point, it was evident that the bomb would be used not to deter Germany but to destroy Japan, and not as the final act of World War II but as the opening salvo of what would become the Cold War. The true target of the first atomic bomb wasn’t, in fact, Tokyo, but Moscow, with the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sacrificed on the altar of American global imperial ambition.
For the scientists at Chicago, that new context demanded new thinking. In June 1945, a committee of physicists led by James Franck submitted a report to Secretary of War Henry Stimson warning of the profound political and ethical consequences of employing such a bomb without exhausting all other alternatives. “We believe,” the Franck Report stated, “that the use of nuclear bombs for an early, unannounced attack against Japan [would be] inadvisable.” The report instead proposed a demonstration before international observers, arguing that such a display could serve as a gesture of goodwill and might avert the need to use the bombs altogether.
One of that report’s signatories, Leo Szilard, who had been among the bomb’s earliest advocates, further sought to prevent what he had come to recognize as the catastrophic potential outcome of their creation. With Germany defeated, he felt a personal responsibility for reversing the course he had helped set in motion. Echoing concerns articulated in the Franck Report, he drafted a petition to be circulated among the scientists. While acknowledging that the bomb might offer short-term military and political advantages against Japan, he warned that its deployment would ultimately prove morally indefensible and strategically self-defeating, a position which would also be held by 6 of the 7 U.S. five-star generals and admirals of that moment.
Szilard emphasized that the atomic bomb wasn’t just a more powerful weapon but a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare, an instrument of annihilation. He already feared Americans might come to regret that their own government had sown the seeds of global destruction by legitimizing the sudden obliteration of Japanese cities, a precedent that would render a heavily industrialized, densely populated country like the United States especially vulnerable.
Moreover, he concluded that using such weapons of unimaginable destructive power without sufficient military justification would severely undermine American credibility in future arms control efforts. He observed that the development of the bomb under conditions of extreme wartime secrecy had created an abjectly anti-democratic situation, one in which the public was denied any opportunity to deliberate on such an irrevocable and consequential decision.
As Eugene Rabinowitch, a co-author of the Franck Report (who would later co-found The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists), would note soon after, the scientists in Chicago were growing increasingly uneasy in the face of escalating secrecy: “Many scientists began to wonder: Against whom was this extreme secrecy directed? What was the sense of keeping our success secret from the Japanese? Would it have helped them to know that we had an atomic bomb ready?”
Rabinowitch concluded that the only “danger” posed by such a disclosure was that the Chicago scientists might be proven right, and Japan might surrender. “Since there was no justifiable reason to hold the bomb secret from the Japanese,” he argued, “many scientists felt that the purpose of deepened secrecy was to keep the knowledge of the bomb… from the American people.”
In other words, officials in Washington were concerned that a successful demonstration might deprive them of the coveted opportunity to use the bomb and assert their newly acquired monopoly (however temporary) on unprecedented power.
The Road to Trinity and the Cult of Oppenheimer
Seventy scientists at Chicago endorsed the Szilard Petition. By then, however, their influence on the project had distinctly diminished. Despite their early contributions, notably the achievement of the first self-sustained nuclear chain reaction in December 1942, the project’s center of gravity had shifted to Los Alamos.
Recognizing this, Szilard sought to circulate the petition among his colleagues there, too, hoping to invoke a shared sense of scientific responsibility and awaken their moral conscience in the critical weeks leading up to the first test of the weapon. Why did that effort fail? Why was there so little dissent, debate, or resistance at Los Alamos given the growing scientific opposition, bordering on revolt, that had emerged in Chicago?
One answer lies in Oppenheimer himself. In popular culture and historical scholarship, his legacy is often framed as that of a tragic figure: the reluctant architect of the atomic age, an idealist drawn into the ethically fraught task of creating a weapon of mass destruction compelled by the perceived exigencies of an existential war.
Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness.
Yet the myth of him as a Promethean figure who suffered for unleashing the fundamental forces of nature onto a society unprepared to bear responsibility for it obscures the extent of his complicity. Far from being a passive participant, in the final months of the Manhattan Project, he emerged as a willing collaborator in the coordination of the coming atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
When Oppenheimer and physicist Edward Teller (who would come to be known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb”) received Szilard’s petition, neither shared it. While Oppenheimer offered no response, Teller provided a striking explanation: “The things we are working on are so terrible that no amount of protesting or fiddling with politics will save our souls.” He further rejected the idea that he held any authority to influence the bomb’s use. “You may think it is a crime to continue to work,” he conceded, “but I feel that I should do the wrong thing if I tried to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we just helped it escape.”
Teller later claimed to be in “absolute agreement” with the petition, but added that “Szilard asked me to collect signatures… I felt I could not do so without first seeking Oppenheimer’s permission more directly. I did so and Oppenheimer talked me out of it, saying that we as scientists have no business meddling in political pressure of that kind… I am ashamed to say that he managed to talk me out of [it].”
Teller’s explanation was likely self-serving given his later acrimonious rift with Oppenheimer over the hydrogen bomb. Yet further evidence indicates that Oppenheimer actively sought to suppress debate and dissent. Physicist Robert Wilson recalled that upon arriving at Los Alamos in 1943, he raised concerns about the broader implications of their work and the “terrible problems” it might create, particularly given the exclusion of the Soviet Union, then an ally. The Los Alamos director, Wilson remembered, “didn’t want to talk about that sort of thing” and would instead redirect the conversation to technical matters. When Wilson helped organize a meeting to discuss the future trajectory of the project in the wake of Germany’s defeat, Oppenheimer cautioned him against it, warning that “he would get into trouble by calling such a meeting.”
The meeting nonetheless proceeded, with Oppenheimer in attendance, though his presence proved stifling. “He participated very much, dominating the meeting,” Wilson remembered. Oppenheimer pointed to the upcoming San Francisco Conference to establish the United Nations and insisted that political questions would be addressed there by those with greater expertise, implying that scientists had no role to play in such matters and ought to abstain from influencing the applications of their work.
Reflecting on his mindset at the time, Oppenheimer explained, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.” In a similar vein, his oft-quoted remark that “the physicists have known sin” was frequently misinterpreted. He was not referring, he insisted, to the “sin” of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but to pride for “intervening explicitly and heavy-handedly in the course of human history.”
When situated within this broader context of a professed commitment to scientific detachment, Oppenheimer’s behavior becomes more intelligible. In practice, however, his stated ideals stood in stark contrast to his conduct. While he claimed to reject political engagement, he ultimately intervened in precisely such a manner, using his position to advocate forcefully for the bomb’s immediate military use against Japan without prior warning. He emerged as a leading opponent of any prospective demonstration, cautioning that it would undermine the psychological impact of the bomb’s use, which could only be realized through a sudden, unannounced detonation on a relatively untouched, non-military target like the city of Hiroshima. This position stood in sharp contrast to that of the Chicago scientists, of whom only 15% supported using the bomb in such a manner.
That climate of deference fostered a culture of complicity, where questions of social responsibility were subordinated to uncritical faith in authority. Reflecting on that dynamic, physicist Rudolf Peierls acknowledged, “I knew that Oppenheimer was on a committee and was briefing with the high-ups. I felt there were two things one could rely on: Oppenheimer to put the reasonable ideas across, and that one could trust people. After all, we are not terrorists at heart or anything… Both these statements might now be somewhat optimistic.”
Ultimately, the only member of Los Alamos to register dissent was Joseph Rotblat, who quietly resigned on ethical grounds after learning in November 1944 that there was no active Nazi atomic bomb program. His departure remained a personal act of conscience, however, rather than an effort to initiate a broader moral reckoning within the scientific community.
“Remember Your Humanity”
The legacy of Oppenheimer, a burden we all now carry, lies in his mistaking proximity to power for power itself. Rather than using his influence to restrain the bomb’s use, he exercised what authority he had to facilitate its most catastrophic outcome, entrusting its consequences to political leaders who soon revealed their recklessness. In doing so, he helped lay the groundwork for what President Dwight D. Eisenhower would, in his farewell address to Congress in 1961, warn against as “the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”
Yet we are not doomed. This history should also remind us that the development and use of nuclear weapons was not inevitable. There were those who spoke out and a different path might well have been possible. While we cannot know exactly how events would have unfolded had dissent been amplified rather than suppressed, we can raise our own voices now to demand a safer, saner future. Our collective survival may well depend on it. How much longer a world armed with nuclear weapons can endure remains uncertain. The only viable path forward lies in renewing a commitment to, as Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell urged, “remember your humanity, and forget the rest.” With ever more nations developing increasingly powerful arsenals, one thing remains clear: As the Doomsday Clock moves ever closer to midnight, there is no time to waste.
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