Politics
Contributor: NPR faces a real threat in defunding fight that's coming
In February, Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency put the nation’s public radio network on notice. “Defund NPR,” he wrote on X. “It should survive on its own.” Musk’s tweet was the latest indication that the Trump administration intends to alter the way the broadcaster operates. In January, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr announced an investigation into the legality of underwriting — the public media equivalent of advertising. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense ordered NPR and other news organizations to give up their offices at the Pentagon. Breitbart News will occupy NPR’s space.
During its 55-year history, NPR’s funding scares have come almost on schedule, heralded by the arrival of a new Republican administration (Ronald Reagan, 1981), a rightward shift in the Congress (Newt Gingrich, 1995) or a decision by network executives that angers conservatives (the firing of commentator Juan Williams, 2010).
The previous threats have been serious, but none as serious as what’s unfolding now.
The network is vulnerable. In 2024, former NPR business editor Uri Berliner posted an essay on the Free Press substack site accusing the organization of adopting a left-wing stance in which “race and identity” were “paramount.” NPR pushed back, but the “bias” allegations received extensive coverage. Simultaneously, the network has been losing its audience. It started during the pandemic, as commuters who had tuned into “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” abandoned drive-time for radio-free walks down the hall to home offices. Listenership dropped — from an estimated 60 million in 2020 to 42 million in 2024.
In mounting its defense, NPR should look back at its earlier wins and losses.
By far the worst incident sprang from the recommendation of a Reagan-appointed panel to cancel the entire budget of the Corp. for Public Broadcasting, the agency that oversees both NPR and PBS. Although David Stockman, Reagan’s budget czar, ultimately opted for a less drastic 25% cut, Frank Mankiewicz, then president of NPR, viewed even the lower amount as potentially ruinous.
In 1982, Mankiewicz tried to free NPR from government funding altogether by monetizing a number of embryonic online delivery systems that would beam stock reports, sports scores and news headlines to handheld devices while transmitting NPR shows to home computers and inventory and pricing information to business customers. The technology, however, had yet to be fully developed. Within a year, Mankiewicz was gone and NPR was $9.1 million in debt.
The CPB bailed out NPR, but not before extracting concessions. Since the network’s founding in 1970, it had received grants from the agency to pay for programming. Now, the grants would go to NPR stations, enabling them either to continue buying “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered” from the network or shows such as “Marketplace” from independent suppliers.
NPR executives bemoaned the change but the advantage of giving federal money to the stations became apparent in 1995 after Gingrich, the newly elected speaker of the House, announced plans to “zero out” the CPB. Where in the past this proposal would have been seen as a threat to NPR and PBS, it was instead seen as endangering beloved local stations. “If you were attacking NPR,” a network executive later said, “you were attacking your own community.” When an amendment to eliminate CPB funding came up in the House, it lost by a two-to-one margin.
By 2010, when NPR dismissed Williams, the media world was beginning to fracture in ways that anticipated the current environment, and the firing of a conservative commentator became a litmus test. NPR’s rationale for letting Williams go, which was that he’d made what it considered Islamophobic remarks while appearing on Fox News, fell flat. Fox lambasted NPR and handed Williams a $2-million contract. NPR investigated the executive who fired Williams and she resigned. Jon Stewart mocked the network on “The Daily Show” with a reference to a gentler public radio commentator: “NPR, you just brought a tote bag full of David Sedaris books to a knife fight.”
In 2011, the Republican-controlled House — responding to the firing of Williams and to a later controversy involving a right-wing video sting that captured an NPR executive seemingly agreeing to publicize shariah law — voted 228 to 192 to defund the network. The Democratic-controlled Senate, however, did not go along. President Obama, who signed the bill that kept the funding alive, nevertheless aimed a barb at NPR during that year’s White House Correspondents Dinner: “I was looking forward to new programming like ‘No Things Considered.’ ”
The defunding effort shaping up in 2025 promises dangers harder to joke about. During his first term, Trump stated that the CPB should be defunded. In his second term, he is unleashing an assault on the very idea of public agencies.
NPR’s defense will likely be that since it now gets just 1% of its budget from the government, it presents no threat to the national purse. But it’s not that simple. According to its own reporting on “All Things Considered,” while the stations indeed get more government money than does NPR itself, they end up spending a lot of it for NPR programs. With a president who openly despises the mainstream media, and with all branches of government in Republican control, the CPB will not be coming to the rescue.
Yet there are reasons to hope that NPR will survive. First, regardless of Berliner’s critique, NPR has always been a source of ground-breaking journalistic practices and superb reporting. It has established a solid foothold in American culture.
In 1972, NPR named Susan Stamberg host of “All Things Considered,” making her the first woman to front a national news show. In 1973, NPR assigned reporter Josh Darsa to the Russell Senate Office Building to cover the Watergate hearings. No other broadcaster had a reporter in the room each day. In 2003, NPR was the only American broadcast network to keep a correspondent (Anne Garrels) in Baghdad during the aerial assault that launched the Iraq War. NPR’s current efforts are similarly strong, whether they be dispatches by Jerusalem reporter Daniel Estrin about the conflict in Gaza or those by Berlin reporter Rob Schmitz about threats to NATO. Ari Shapiro, now the cohost of “All Things Considered,” recently contributed a thorough piece from Panama about reaction to Trump’s stated hopes to reclaim control of the Panama Canal.
Another reason for hope is that as opposed to 1995 — or even to 2011 — the American media landscape is in such poor shape that NPR is more necessary than ever. Across the country, print journalism has imploded. Commercial TV and radio news operations are also in decline. Especially in red states, NPR is sometimes the only source of local news. True, people everywhere now get information from cable channels, random websites or social media, but many still want what NPR offers.
As Bill Siemering, the creator of “All Things Considered,” put it in the organization’s 1970 mission statement:
“In its journalistic mode, National Public Radio will actively explore, investigate, and interpret issues of national and international import. The programs will enable the individual to better understand himself, his government, his institutions, and his natural and social environment.”
This is as good an idea now as it was more than half a century ago. Today’s political climate, however, is even harsher than that during Richard Nixon’s embattled presidency. In the coming fight, NPR will not only need more than a tote bag of David Sedaris books. It will need to rally support at the national and local level. It will need to bring a knife.
Steve Oney is a Los Angeles-based journalist and the author of “On Air: The Triumph and Tumult of NPR,” published this week.
The Trump administration has signed off on a company’s plan to convert an oil and gas pipeline to pump groundwater from the Mojave Desert to thirsty California cities for the first time, a lucrative venture that critics say threatens natural springs and wildlife.
The federal Bureau of Land Management released documents Thursday saying that Cadiz Inc.’s plan to repurpose 162 miles of the pipeline to transport water “will not significantly affect” the environment.
“We’re excited to achieve this pivotal milestone. After many years of planning and environmental review, the project has now reached the construction stage,” said Susan Kennedy, chair and chief executive of Cadiz.
Environmental advocates and leaders of Native tribes, who have been fighting the project, criticized the decision.
“This groundwater mining proposal would drain the desert and rob the Mojave of its rare springs and wildlife habitat,” said Chance Wilcox, California desert associate director of the National Parks Conservation Assn. “It’s indefensible that the Trump administration would once again try to revive the pointless Cadiz project, by defying decades of scientific warnings and refusing to conduct an environmental review of the groundwater mining.”
The application for the federal authorization was filed by the Fenner Gap Mutual Water Co. The documents say the company plans to build seven pump stations, three of them located on federal land managed by the agency.
The 30-inch steel pipeline runs underground from Cadiz’s desert property, near the town of Amboy, northward to the town of Mojave.
The BLM said in its authorization that repurposing the pipeline for water “would comply with all applicable statutes and regulations.” The agency said it has “reasonably determined that the impacts of groundwater withdrawal associated with Cadiz’s groundwater extraction project are outside the scope of analysis.”
Cadiz’s attempts to export water from its property 200 miles east of Los Angeles have drawn controversy for decades.
In 2019, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed legislation that requires the project to undergo scientific study and gain approval from the State Lands Commission before it can take water from the Mojave and sell it to California cities.
Activists opposing the company’s plans include civil rights leader Dolores Huerta.
“Cadiz spells destruction for water, sacred lands, and the desert economy,” Huerta said in a statement. “It is exactly this type of greed and injustice that I have dedicated my life to oppose.”
Leaders of nearby tribes have also objected to Cadiz’s plans to pump from the desert aquifer near the Mojave Trails National Monument and Mojave National Preserve.
“It is the living heart of the desert,” said Daniel Leivas, chairman of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe. “To drain it would be to drain the life out of the entire desert. No profit is worth such desecration.”
Chairman Timothy Williams of the Fort Mojave Indian Tribe said the company’s plan “to pump and sell 25 times more groundwater each year than the aquifer can replenish would desecrate our traditional territories.”
“Pumping more groundwater than is sustainably replenished is not only negligent, but dangerous to the American Desert Southwest,” he said in the joint statement with other opponents of the project.
For years, while pursuing its plan to sell water far away, the company has been using wells on its property to irrigate nearly 2,000 acres of farmland growing lemons, grapes and other crops. It has drilled more wells in anticipation of being able to export water once the government approved its pipeline.
The company intends to pipe water to communities in San Bernardino County and says it’s “expected to provide one of the lowest-cost sources of new water in the drought-plagued Southwest.” It says the federal permit “marks a key milestone as we finalize project financing with prospective investors.”
Cadiz bought the 220-mile pipeline from El Paso Natural Gas in 2020. Once construction is completed, the company says the pipeline will be able to transport up to 25,000 acre-feet of water per year — about 5% of what Los Angeles uses each year.
The Los Angeles-based corporation is also seeking to build a new pipeline along a railroad right-of-way to transport water to the south.
Environmental groups have repeatedly filed lawsuits challenging the project.
Ileene Anderson, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, called the Trump administration’s decision “a green light for environmental destruction.”
She said six of the proposed pumping stations slated to be built are in the habitat of desert tortoises, a species in decline.
“We’ve successfully fended off this project before and we’ll continue to fight to stop this zombie from coming back,” Anderson said.
In 2021, the Biden administration reversed a Trump administration decision that had cleared the way for Cadiz to pipe water across public land. In 2022, a federal judge scrapped the pipeline permit that the Trump administration had issued.
But during President Trump’s second term, the company has again made headway on its plans. In February, Cadiz announced that the federal Environmental Protection Agency had invited it to submit an application for a $194-million low-interest loan for the northern pipeline project.
The company said in May that it reached an agreement with the federal Bureau of Reclamation to provide funding for a review of its potential role in “augmenting water supplies” along the shrinking Colorado River.
The company has also been lobbying the Trump administration. The group Public Citizen said in a recent report that Cadiz, through its nonprofit Fenner Gap Mutual Water Co., enlisted former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt’s new lobbying firm, the Bernhardt Group, and has spent at least $330,000 on lobbying in 2025 and 2026.
Records show lobbyist Luke Johnson has repeatedly accompanied Kennedy at meetings with Interior Department officials.
“The extensive influence of David Bernhardt’s boutique lobbying firm on the agency he formerly led highlights how insider firms staffed with former Trump officials have grown in recent years,” said Alan Zibel, a research director with Public Citizen. He said Bernhardt and his lobbyists “have learned how to master influence-peddling in the anything-goes era of Trump 2.0.”
Earlier this month, an Arizona water agency announced it signed an initial “memorandum of understanding” agreement to buy up to 10,000 acre-feet of water per year from Cadiz’s Mojave Groundwater Bank. The Central Arizona Irrigation and Drainage District provides water to farmlands in Pinal County, where growers are dealing with water cutbacks.
The company said that for this to happen, it would need to build pipelines and reach deals to exchange water across state lines.
Members of California’s congressional delegation have raised concerns. In a recent letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, California Sens. Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla called for a thorough environmental review, saying that federal agencies and peer-reviewed scientific analyses have “warned of the significant and irreversible impacts that Cadiz’s project could have on federal lands and surrounding communities.”
Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Indio) said in a letter to Burgum that he is concerned about the company’s long-standing effort to extract and export groundwater.
“The area I represent cannot afford to absorb the long-term costs of a commercially driven groundwater export scheme,” Ruiz said.
President Trump has promoted a chain of newly rebranded gas stations across the Philadelphia area with lower gas prices. The New York Times has not been able to get detailed information about who is behind the stations. The Trump administration says it did not fund or subsidize the company.
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Kelley Paul is no stranger to the American political scene. As the wife of Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and the daughter-in-law of longtime former Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas), she has seen her fair share of the campaign trail, emerging as a powerful surrogate during her husband’s 2016 presidential run.
She is also an accomplished writer, speaker, and public relations professional. As America ushers in its 250th anniversary, Paul saw the perfect opportunity to branch out into the world of children’s literature. Recently she sat down with Fox News Digital in Las Vegas at Freedom Fest to discuss her new book, “Good Night, Young American.”
Kelley Paul is the wife of Sen. Rand Paul and author of two books. (Courtesy Kelley Paul)
Paul credits her family for giving her the inspiration for the new project:
“I have to give a lot of credit to my daughter-in-law, Kate. She and our son were over for dinner last summer with our grandson, who was only six months old at the time. And Kate was like, you know, we need more patriotic books for babies. She wasn’t really happy with a lot of the book options she was seeing. And that night at dinner, we kind of played around with some ideas. And I came up with ‘Good Night Young American.’ And a year later, here it is.”
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“Good Night, Young American,” recommended for children ages 4–8, takes kids on a visually and thematically engaging journey through early and colonial history.
“Well, our revolutionary history is such a great adventure, right? So when I came up with the concept that my little boy would start out on the 4th of July with his parents, asking, what is it all about? I knew we’d be celebrating the 250th. Kids ask, what are we really celebrating?
And his dad describes the Declaration of Independence to him in the signing. So I tried to think what is going to appeal to children in this great adventure of our revolution. So when he falls asleep that night, he’s in the crow’s nest of the Mayflower. He is a pilgrim, he’s a colonist, and then he makes friends with all the great revolutionary heroes that we know. So he makes friends with Sam Adams, he joins the Sons of Liberty, he meets at the Green Dragon. This is so exciting for children, right?
It’s visual stuff. He makes friends with Ben Franklin, and he’s flying the kite. Dramatically rides on the midnight ride with Paul Revere. He and his dog, his little dog, are with him for all the adventures. And of course, he crosses the Delaware with George Washington. And I wanted to make the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the writing of it something that was dynamic and exciting visually. So I have him swinging on the Liberty Bell when the declaration is signed.”
Paul worked closely with the illustrator, Marika Monesi, to bring the events of America’s founding to life in an engaging and visually appealing way for children.
The Liberty Bell, originally saved from the British by Lynnport farmer Frederick Leaser, sits in its Philadelphia shrine. (iStock)
“She really captured the excitement on the little boy’s face, his personality, but I worked very close with her,” Paul said. “I wanted there to be a lot of movement, a lot of dynamic images. So, for example, with the Liberty Bell, for kids, a bunch of men standing around writing a document…I wanted to bring it to life. So I said, let’s have him running up to the top of the bell tower in Philadelphia at Freedom Hall and swinging on the Liberty Bell. And she was just such a great artist. With the George Washington scenes, he’s crossing the Delaware because that, again, is so visual. I wanted drive home to children the incredible bravery and courage of our founders, how cold and miserable and hard that war was.
“Also, I love the illustration that she did of the King of England reading the Declaration of Independence. I have to give my husband Rand a little credit there. On the first couple of drafts that she did, Rand was like, ‘He needs to be fatter. King George was famously fat!’ So it was a lot of fun. It was very collaborative.”
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Part of Paul’s motivation for the book was related to the teaching of American history today, and the controversies therein:
“I do think that we’ve gotten away from really celebrating our founders and our heroes. What they were doing in 1776 was incredibly radical, if you think about it. At that time, everyone accepted the divine right of kings. Everyone accepted hereditary rule. And our founders took Enlightenment ideas from John Locke and philosophers, and they turned it into the framework for a government. The idea of self-government and that our rights come from our Creator, that we have inalienable rights that are given to us by God and not from a king. Those were radical ideas of the time.
Historians say an early draft of the Declaration of Independence offered new insight into how Thomas Jefferson refined the nation’s founding document. (Stock Montage/Stock Montage/Getty Images)
I like to say our founders were the first civil rights heroes, the first civil libertarians. And I think our education system has gotten away from that. They don’t view them in the time that they existed, and suddenly now everything is oppressor versus oppressed narrative. And they are labeled more like colonizers or enslavers, and that’s the only view that they’re looked at, and not as human beings who sacrificed their very lives to write the Declaration of Independence, to form this country…it was an incredible, bold, and courageous act, but it was also an act of moral courage and philosophical courage.”
Ultimately, Paul hopes that her books will stimulate the natural curiosity of America’s youth to learn more about their rich history:
Participants carry the City of Cumberland’s “America 250” parade banner down Baltimore Street during the America 250 parade in downtown Cumberland, Maryland, on June 27, 2026. Spectators line both sides of the street as American and Maryland flags lead the procession. (Fox News Digital/ David Marcus)
“Well, I hope that my books, especially with America’s 250, will spark a lot of questions and that they will give a framework for parents to talk to their kids about the founding of this country. And I hope children from a very, very young age will come away with this idea that they are a part of America’s story, that they as Americans can take pride in the heroism of our revolutionary founders. That as Americans, this is all of our story. So that’s really my goal with the books.”
One of the biggest challenges Paul faced was taking big ideas that may be hard for a four or five-year-old to grasp, like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, and distilling them down into an accessible format for kids:
“Well, I try to use language that kids could understand, and very much use simple terms. But if you think about it, it is simple. Our rights come from God. And when he makes friends with Thomas Jefferson, he says, Thomas Jefferson has written this amazing document that says that we can all be free to live our lives the way we choose, and no government can take our rights to, you know, to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness away from us.
He also talks about James Madison and the Bill of Rights and the most important right is freedom of speech. That is that no government can tell you what to say or what not to say.”
Rand Paul, who famously puts Constitutional principles front and center in the public square, also played a key role in the book’s thematic development.
Kelley Paul and her husband Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul. (Courtesy Kelley Paul)
“Rand has been incredibly supportive. I’m just so grateful and blessed to have had an amazing, now 36-year marriage to Rand Paul. And he was very involved. He would read over the drafts and gave me a lot of, like I said, good advice about things in history that he thought I should include.
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And I’m also just very grateful to be the daughter-in-law of Ron Paul. And so, I wanted these books to be there for our little grandson who I call ‘my favorite little American’ and help him from an early age be educated in the legacy that, the Paul family has in this country.”
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