Restoring Public Radio Funding Won’t Be Easy — Creativity Is Key.

With little hope for federal funding this year after the recently passed CPB clawback bill, public radio is looking toward 2026 and 2027 for possible restoration of needed financial help, but those on either side of the aisle are not optimistic.

While Republican chairs of the House and Senate Appropriations Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies subcommittees say they are considering allocating funds to individual public stations, potentially with strings attached, according to Communications Daily, supporters are doubtful that Congress can act before existing funding lapses Oct. 1.

“I think my constituents are concerned about local [public broadcasters] and I still am,” Senate Appropriations LHHS Chair Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va. says. Although Capito received an award in 2024 from America’s Public Television Stations as a “champion of public broadcasting,” she still voted to cut CPB funding because she doesn’t think “our federal dollars should be supporting news outlets that have a political bent.” Claiming that NPR and PBS “didn’t make adjustments” to what Republicans now view as an increasingly pro-Democratic bias in their news coverage and other content, Capito has not ruled out restoring funding, but says “I’m not there yet.”

Meanwhile, Senate Communications Subcommittee ranking member Ben Ray Lujan, D-NM, says CPB funding is “a fight that’s not going to go away.” Senate Appropriations member Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of two upper-chamber Republicans who voted against passing the Rescissions Act, says “These are small stations [serving] Americans who are living” in areas commercial broadcasters don’t cover. “They deserve to have some level of communication, and public broadcasting is it.”

APTS CEO Kate Riley agrees that funding restoration is “unlikely,” before Oct.1, and that public broadcasters “are going to face a funding cliff that is going to force many of them to go off the air. That service will be lost [even if lawmakers later restart federal funding] and this is going to over-impact rural and smaller communities.”

New and different money-raising strategies

All this begs the question, what can public radio do now? Jacobs Media’s Fred Jacobs, who has served on the board of the Public Radio Program Directors association and worked with public stations for many years, puts forward several ideas in the company’s blog.

“It is indeed a challenge, but it also broadly opens the doors of change, something that has been much-needed but rarely done in the past, as most public radio stations have operated with much less financial pressures than their commercial cousins,” Jacobs says. While acknowledging the increase in donations from listeners even before Congress voted to pull funding, he feels public radio will need to do more than the usual “tired and terribly unpopular” pledge drives.

“There’s evidence to suggest that public radio could benefit from new and different strategies and tactics,” Jacobs says. “Our work with Children’s Miracle Networks, the organization that raises hundreds of millions of dollars for local children’s hospital, features many innovative fundraising events. Beyond ‘radiothons’ with local stations, CMN also has developed dance marathons, golf tournaments, round-up with retail partners, and even a gaming platform. Bottom line? You’ve got to connect with a broad range of donors if you wish to develop a system that can go the distance.”

Jacobs suggests radio needs to think bigger, even along the lines of “a large-scale concert, along the lines of a ‘Live Aid’ or a series of smaller ones that could tour from market to market. Either way, he says, “It will take a major effort on a big scale to help smaller non-comm and independent stations stay afloat during this unprecedented test of public radio’s finances and its will. For public radio, emerging from this squeeze in good — if not better — shape will require innovation and creativity, to be sure.”