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democracy
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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Trump Is Testing the Limits of Our Democracy—Will We Hold Firm?
The way we all react to these tests—from the disappearing of U.S. citizens to the threatening of judges—will determine Trump’s and the GOP’s next steps. So, what do we do?
Jul 15, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to strip Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship is a “test.”
Kids do it all the time. Throw a tantrum in the store demanding cookies and if the parents don’t remove them from the store right away, every visit will see the tantrums escalate. Testing the boundaries. When the test succeeds, the boundaries get moved and a new boundary gets tested, on and on until finally the child’s behavior is so egregious he’s stopped. Or he always gets away with everything and grows up to be Donald Trump.
We learn this early.
We’ve seen a series of these tests coming from the Trump administration, following the very specific and consistently repeated pattern that history tells us played out in the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Pinochet, Putin, Orbán, Erdoğon, el Sisi, and pretty much every other person who took over a democracy and then, step-by-step turned it into a dictatorship.
Trump started testing racism as a political weapon when he came down the elevator at Trump Tower and spoke about “Mexican murderers and rapists” in front of what media reports said was a crowd he’d hired for $50 per person from a company that provides extras to movie and TV production companies.
While his initial goal was reportedly to get NBC to renew “Apprentice” and pay him more than Gwen Stefani, his racism test work out shockingly well; suddenly he was a serious contender for the party that had inherited the KKK vote when Democrats abandoned the South with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in the 1960s.
If he can do it to Rosie—if there isn’t furious pushback (and so far, there isn’t) against this latest test—he can do it to me or you.
Another test was whether the exaggerations, distortions, and outright lies that he and his family had used to hustle real estate could work in politics.
He quickly discovered that GOP base voters—after decades of having uncritically (slavishly, even) swallowed lies about trickle-down economics, “evil union bosses,” and the “importance of small government”—were more than happy to embrace or ignore, as the occasion demanded, his prevarications.
From there, Trump tested exactly how gullible his most fervent supporters—and the media that fed them a daily diet of very profitable outrage and hate—would buy into a lie so audacious, so in defiance of both the law and common sense, so outside the bounds of normal patriotism, that they could be whipped into a murderous frenzy and kill three police officers while trying to overthrow the government of the United States of America.
The nation and our press reacted as if he’d failed that test, but when he was able to cow enough senators to avoid being convicted in his impeachment trial, he knew he’d won.
Now he’s again testing how far he can go.
George Retes is a 25-year-old Hispanic natural-born American citizen and disabled Army veteran working as a security guard at a legal marijuana operation in California. When it was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), he got in his car and tried to drive away to avoid getting in the middle of what he saw as trouble.
Masked agents chased him down, smashed the window of his car and pepper-sprayed him in the face, dragged him out of his car, and disappeared him.
Testing.
Will Democrats make a stink? Will the media make it more than a one-day story? Will any Republicans break rank and stand against his excesses? Was it even mentioned on any of the Sunday shows? How far can he go next time?
So far, Trump thinks he’s winning these tests. The outrages are coming so fast and furious that it’s becoming impossible to keep track of them, just like in Germany in 1933 and Chile in 1973.
Retes wasn’t the only U.S. citizen who’s been arrested or detained by ICE; they’ve gone after a mayor, a member of Congress, and even assaulted a United States senator.
A 71-year-old grandmother was assaulted and handcuffed by masked agents. Axios documents others; as the CNN headline on the story about other U.S. citizens being snatched notes: “‘We Are Not Safe in America Today:’ These American Citizens Say They Were Detained by ICE.”
Testing.
After years of hysteria on the billionaire-owned sewer of Fox “News” about our nation’s first Black president deploying “FEMA Camps” to detain white conservatives, Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others in Las Vegas, ranting that Federal Emergency Management Agency Camps set up after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 were “a dry run for law enforcement and military to start kickin’ down doors and... confiscating guns.”
He murdered those innocent concertgoers, he said, to “wake up the American public and get them to arm themselves,” saying, “Sometimes sacrifices have to be made.”
Now those detention facilities conservatives feared has come into being, as Republicans in Congress just funded concentration camps like “Alligator Auschwitz” in multiple states across America.
Visiting congress members claim inmates are packed over 30 to a cage, with Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) reporting her horror when she was shown that “they get their drinking water, and they brush their teeth, where they poop, in the same unit.”
Testing.
We recently learned via CBS News from a whistleblower and now-released texts that Trump’s former lawyer and now-nominee for a lifetime federal judgeship, Emil Bove, then working in the Justice Department, advised the administration officials to tell federal courts “fuck you” when they ordered the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia from an El Salvadoran hellhole concentration camp.
But now—as it was in South Korea when their president tried to end democracy there last year and people poured into the streets and forced the government to act—it’s apparently going to be pretty much exclusively up to us.
For months, the administration appears to have followed his obviously unconstitutional and illegal advice. Republicans want him on the federal bench anyway.
Testing.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia—who Trump official Erez Reuveni said had been deported “in error”—described how he was treated in that El Salvadoran concentration camp, telling his attorneys and the court that he’d been repeatedly beaten, then forced to kneel from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am “with guards striking anyone who fell from exhaustion.”
He had committed no crime and was deported in open violation of a federal judge who demanded the plane either not take off or return before landing in El Salvador. The Trump administration simply and contemptibly ignored the court’s order.
Testing.
In a White House visit, Trump told the El Salvadoran president, Nayib Bukele (who refers to himself as “the world’s coolest dictator”), that he wants to send American citizens to that country’s torture centers.
“The homegrowns are next, the homegrowns,” Trump said as the two men laughed. “You’ve got to build about five more places.”
Testing.
Meanwhile, ICE detention facilities are also holding U.S. citizens like Andrea Velez, 32, who was snatched by masked agents during a raid in Los Angeles. As LA’s ABC News affiliate Channel 7 reported:
Velez, a marketing designer and Cal Poly Pomona graduate, was arrested Tuesday morning after her family dropped her off at work. According to her attorneys, Velez's sister and mother saw her being approached and grabbed by masked men with guns, so they called the Los Angeles Police Department to report a kidnapping.
Police responded to the scene near Ninth and Spring streets and realized the kidnapping call was actually a federal immigration-enforcement operation.
She’s out of the detention facility now, but on $5000 bond; ICE apparently has plans for her future.
Testing.
And now Trump is telling us he wants to strip a natural-born U.S. citizen comedienne—who’s made jokes about him that pissed him off—of her U.S. citizenship, “Because,” he says, “of the fact that Rosie O’Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship.”
If he can do it to Rosie—if there isn’t furious pushback (and so far, there isn’t) against this latest test—he can do it to me or you.
Hitler gained the chancellorship of Germany in January 1933; by July of that same year, a mere six months later, he’d revoked the citizenship of thousands for the crimes of being “socialists,” “communists,” Jews, or journalists and commentators who’d written or spoken ill of him. Trump appears to be just a bit behind him on that timeline.
Testing.
Trump wants NPR and PBS defunded as soon as possible, having issued an Executive Order to that effect, and has ordered his Federal Communications Commission to launch investigations that could strip major TV networks of their broadcast licenses if they continue to report on him and his activities in ways that offend him. He shut down the Voice Of America, ending America’s promotion of democracy across the world. He kicked The Associated Press out of the White House press pool.
Testing.
Trump has declared large strips of land along the southern border to be federalized territory and put the American military in charge of policing the area, in clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That law prohibits the military from performing any sort of police function against civilians.
Testing.
When students spoke out on campus against Trump ally and longtime Kushner family friend Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu’s murderous assault of Gaza and support for settlers stealing West Bank land from Palestinians, armed and masked federal agents began arresting those students, imprisoning them for their First Amendment-protected speech.
Then Trump went after their universities, bringing several to heel just as Orbán has in Hungary and Putin has in Russia.
Testing.
Yesterday, six Republicans on the Supreme Court said that Trump could wholesale mass- fire employees of the Department of Education, essentially shutting down an agency created and funded by Congress in defiance of the constitutional requirement that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissent, flaming in extreme alarm at her colleagues:
This decision] hands the Executive the power to repeal statutes by firing all those necessary to carry them out... The majority is either willfully blind to the implications of its ruling or naive, but either way the threat to our Constitution’s separation of powers is grave.
Or maybe the six Republican justices on the court are just scared? After all, judges across the country are being threatened, having pizzas delivered to their homes in the middle of the night by way of saying, “We know where you live.” This after U.S. District Judge Esther Salas’ son, Daniel Anderl, was fatally shot at their New Jersey home by a gunman disguised as a pizza delivery driver. Her husband was also shot, but survived.
A few months ago, after one of Trump’s rants against judges who rule against him, Judge Salas told the press:
Hundreds of pizzas have been delivered to judges all over this country in the last few months. And in the last few weeks—judges’ children. And now Daniel’s name was being weaponized to bring fear to judges and their children. You’re saying to those judges—“You want to end up like Judge Salas? You want to end up like Judge Salas’ son?”
Testing.
What’s next? Will we see Americans who’ve spoken poorly of Trump on social media arrested like both Orbán and Putin do?
Will more students end up on the ground or in jail?
Will more judges be charged with the crime of running their own courtrooms in ways Trump and ICE dislike?
More mayors arrested?
More Democratic Senators taken to the ground and handcuffed?
Will Americans start being disappeared in numbers that can’t be ignored? Deported to El Salvador and South Sudan?
Will journalists be destroyed by massive libel suits or imprisoned for what they write?
Will more judges bend to Trump’s will because they’re either terrified or, like Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, have apparently become radicalized by Fox “News” or other right-wing propaganda outlets?
The way we all react to these tests will determine Trump’s and the GOP’s next steps. So, what do we do?
Former President Barack Obama says Democrats need to “toughen up.” While true, it would have been nice to hear “tough” words of outrage, warning, and leadership from him and former Vice President Kamala Harris over the past six months. And former Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
But now—as it was in South Korea when their president tried to end democracy there last year and people poured into the streets and forced the government to act—it’s apparently going to be pretty much exclusively up to us.
See you on July 17—this Thursday—for some “good trouble.”
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