Backed Into an Impossible Corner, CPB Votes to Dissolve

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting calls it quits after a deadly one-two punch of executive orders and rescinded federal funding.

Tuesday afternoon, the Board of Directors of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting formally voted to dissolve the nonprofit corporation. While a White House-led rescission and a quiet exclusion from the federal budget by Congress caused CPB to pare down operations in October, political and legal vulnerability was the final blow that closed the operation.

Here’s how they framed it in their press release:

CPB’s Board 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. 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.

Semipublic has been on break over the holidays and I’d hoped to return with a much more optimistic post to begin 2026. To be clear, there’s a lot for public broadcasting to be hopeful about: Individual giving is up, audience members are engaged, and there are an incredible number of individuals and organizations devoted to ensuring public broadcasting’s future. But the official end of CPB is a solemn reminder that everyone in public media, even stalwart organizations like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is vulnerable to closing, even with an uptick of financial support.

It wasn’t a secret that CPB had identified the end of January 2026 as their final days of existence - I wrote a reflection on what it would mean for public media’s future when they began shuttering on October 1st - but Tuesday's vote and press release were a bit surprising to me. There are several people, myself included, who had assumed that CPB would use some of their remaining resources to go dormant for a period of time instead of fully dissolving. Even if you aren’t holding out hope that a future Congress would re-fund public media, the laws and frameworks that govern the industry, and especially CPB, still exist. They haven’t been repealed.

There’s always legal liability inherent in any nonprofit organization, but there presumably was enough left in the coffers to continue funding liability insurance for at least a handful of years. And the remaining two board members had terms that expired in 2028. In a very hopeful, theoretical future where Congress decided to fund public media again, the Corporation would merely have to reactivate instead of starting from scratch. So why did the board choose to dissolve?

Of course, one of the biggest dangers of keeping CPB alive was the appointment of hostile board members by the current Administration. The only two board members remaining were both nominated by President Biden, which presumably means that the White House would have been allowed to hand-pick five replacements from the Republican Party.

But I was more struck by the wording CPB used in Tuesday's press release. It mentions vulnerability to future “political manipulation and misuse,” but also to “legal exposure from bad-faith actors.” In terms of lawsuits from private actors, there are probably several that unfriendly parties could potentially bring to be a nuisance, but it would be pointless. Public media is de-funded, the money has been distributed. CPB is licked.

There was, however, a much more pressing legal issue for the Corporation: Not the lawsuit CPB settled in November with NPR, but the outcome of that lawsuit.

To recap, NPR took CPB to court after the Corporation awarded a sizable grant to a new audio distribution company and none to the Public Radio Satellite Service, a satellite distribution entity owned by a collection of stations that contract NPR to run the company. (Full disclosure, I worked for NPR from 2015-2024, two of those years with PRSS). In November, CPB agreed to restore funding to PRSS (without altering the grant to the new distribution entity) through NPR, thus settling the legal dispute.

A lot of excellent journalism and analysis has already been written about the lawsuit so I won't go into more detail about it here, but NPR’s contention, which CPB strongly denied, was that the Corporation bent to political pressure. I'm not going to posit on who exactly was right, but it's clear that PRSS needed the money to continue to operate. It's also clear that CPB was backed into an impossible corner with the announcement of Executive Order 14290: The Corporation could either bend to a high political and likely unconstitutional executive order by refusing to send funds directly to NPR, or ignore the executive order and risk punitive action while the executive order’s legality was being argued in court.

It’s possible CPB chose the former option with the intention of going dormant later, knowing that they'd eliminated as many potential political and legal challenges as they could. The settlement with NPR, therefore, would have made that option impossible: Federal money was sent directly to NPR, violating the executive order and opening the Corporation up to further legal and political liability.

No matter what the real truth is, I think it's clear that CPB was always doomed to dissolve. Their fate was sealed the moments President Trump signed the executive order and issued the rescission.

In any case, it's time for public broadcasting to look forward. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting loyally discharged its duty for nearly six decades and now it's unlikely to come back; whatever comes next will need to be more modern, responsive, and resilient in order to meet the task at hand.

One of the reasons why I started Semipublic was to gather the data and analysis needed to figure out what that is. I hope you'll join us.