CPB Board Dissolves Organization
CPB's board of directors voted to dissolve the 58-year-old organization, according to a news release Monday. Its death is intended to protect public broadcasters, said CPB President Patricia Harrison in the release. “When the Administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our Board faced a profound responsibility: CPB’s final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic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.”
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Board Chair Ruby Calvert said what has happened to public media “is devastating,” but “even in this moment, I am convinced that public media will survive, and that a new Congress will address public media’s role in our country because it is critical to our children's education, our history, culture and democracy to do so.” The board determined that without congressional funding, keeping CPB going wouldn’t serve the public interest or public media. “A dormant and defunded CPB could have become vulnerable to future political manipulation or misuse, threatening the independence of public media and the trust audiences place in it, and potentially subjecting staff and board members to legal exposure from bad-faith actors,” the release said.
CPB will complete distribution of its remaining funds in accordance with Congress’ intent and “provide support to the American Archive of Public Broadcasting to continue digitizing and preserving historic content,” the release said. CPB’s archives, which stretch back to the organization’s founding in 1967, will be preserved in partnership with the University of Maryland and made accessible to the public, the release added. NPR, the FCC and the White House didn’t immediately comment.
Because CPB had already been stripped of its ability to provide funding to public media stations, the actual shuttering of the entity won’t have much of an immediate practical effect for stations on the ground, said Foster Garvey attorney Brad Deutsch, who represents public broadcasters. However, he said the entity’s closure does feel like another blow to public media. “One of the big ones just closed up shop.”
“The loss of CPB will be felt in every community large and small throughout this country,” said America’s Public Television Stations CEO Kate Riley in an emailed statement. “Local stations and the essential services they provide their communities continue to be at risk,” she added. “We call on Congress to act now to restore some level of support for local stations in the final FY 2026 funding bills.”
Deutsch said CPB’s dissolution could make it more complicated to reestablish federal funding for public broadcasters in a future administration, but it also could represent a chance to “start from scratch” in constructing a less vulnerable system for funding public broadcasting.
The consequences of the rescission of federal public broadcast funding "continue to ripple throughout the public media system and the communities that depend on their local stations for lifesaving public safety services, exceptional education resources, and local storytelling that binds communities together," said Riley. "CPB and its extraordinary leadership and stewardship of the federal funding for local public broadcasting stations has helped make much of this work possible for nearly 60 years."