As Republican Senate leaders try to round up the votes for a $9.4 billion rescission package, they seem to have overcome a key concern for at least one senator without even changing the legislation.
Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota has expressed dissatisfaction with the rescission bill over the roughly $1 billion in cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS. Rounds has been clear that, in rural states like his, cutting those funds could disconnect some of his constituents from one of their few sources of news.
But Rounds said Tuesday that he was making a sudden about-face, after striking a deal with the Office of Management and Budget. The deal, which Rounds assured reporters is legal, takes Green New Deal funds and transfers them to the Department of the Interior, keeping about $10 million in fiscal year 2026 funding for 14 tribal radio station grants in rural areas across the country.
“They wouldn’t have survived without this,” Rounds said. “They provide emergency services information for some of the most rural parts of our country and some of the poorest counties in the United States.”
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With this alternative, Rounds said he doesn’t need any changes to the legislative text, and he suggested he didn’t need additional funding passed. His deal, as he described it, uses existing funds that have already been appropriated in the past.
Whether that’s enough for other senators who have concerns about rural broadcasting cuts remains to be seen.
Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska have both been advocating to keep some public broadcast funds, among other changes they’d like to see in the rescission bill. During a hearing in June with OMB Director Russell Vought, Murkowski said the rural broadcasting funding is vital to her rural and tribal constituents so they can get emergency alerts for natural disasters and weather events.
“I hope you feel the urgency that I’m trying to express on behalf of the people in rural Alaska, and I think in many parts of rural America, where this is their lifeline,” Murkowski said to Vought at the hearing.
But other Republican senators from rural states don’t seem as concerned.
Cuts to rural or tribal stations aren’t a dealbreaker for Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, though he referenced his colleagues’ concerns over the matter.
“It’s something we could look at, but that’s not going to cause me to vote against the rescissions package,” he told NOTUS.
Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma also didn’t sound too worried about cuts to public broadcasting in the bill.
“People in rural Oklahoma also have things called cell phones,” Lankford said. “I don’t find a spot in America that can only get news from one source, and it’s the government-provided source.”
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, who is supportive of the rescission package and said he’d like to make it bigger, also told NOTUS he wasn’t worried about the cuts affecting rural news in Missouri, adding he used to work in a station in the southern part of the state.
“I don’t think that these stations rely on PBS funding for the bulk of their funds. They rely on advertising,” Hawley told NOTUS. “I’m pretty well-acquainted with our rural stations in Missouri. I think they’ll be fine.”
Other Republicans said they were supportive of the cuts.
“I’m absolutely in on that,” Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho said of cuts to public broadcasting. “I’ve been trying to do it myself for years.”
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