WASHINGTON — The Corporation for Public Broadcasting — which helped fund NPR, PBS and many local radio and TV stations — is officially shutting down, months after Congress passed spending cuts that stripped it of more than $1 billion in funding.
CPB's board of directors voted to dissolve the private, nonprofit corporation after 58 years of service, the organization announced in a news release Monday.
“For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans—regardless of geography, income, or background—had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling,” said Patricia Harrison, CPB's president and CEO.
Harrison added that when President Donald Trump signed into law last summer a measure to rescind funding by Congress, CPB's 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.”
CPB said its leaders determined that "without the resources to fulfill its congressionally mandated responsibilities, maintaining the corporation as a nonfunctional entity would not serve the public interest or advance the goals of public media."
The organization announced in August that it would begin shutting down after Congress passed the funding cuts. At the time, it said that most staff positions would be eliminated by the end of September and that a small team would remain through January.
In its statement Monday, the organization said it would distribute all of its remaining funds.
Over the summer, the Republican-led House and Senate passed a package of funding cuts targeting CPB and other government agencies, canceling money that Congress had previously allocated to them and fulfilling a request by the Trump administration.
CPB, which Congress created in 1967, helped support more than 1,500 local radio and television stations nationwide. It also funded popular programs like "Sesame Street." Programs on PBS and NPR have been able to remain on the air because of other sources of funding.
