Efficiency Czar Elon Musk signaled Tuesday that he has chosen the next government-funded candidate for the chopping block: National Public Radio.
“Defund NPR. It should survive on its own,” the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) boss posted on X, Tuesday morning. NPR is a left-wing nonprofit media organization that was established by an act of Congress in 1970 and is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
President Trump himself questioned why American taxpayers were still paying “this big-government, Democrat Party propaganda operation” during his first term.
NPR and The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, were set to receive $525 million in public funding in 2024, although an updated figure was not disclosed at the end of the year, according to the Wrap.
The year prior, in 2023, $32 million of NPR’s $318 million in revenue came from the CPB. Overall, NPR syndicates its programming to more than 1,000 public radio stations. While the bulk of NPR’s funding does not come from federal funds, the outlet has said it is a critical component to staying on the airwaves.
“Federal funding is essential to public radio’s service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR,” the outlet says on its website.
Musk has set an ambitious goal of cutting $2 trillion in spending from the $6.8 trillion federal budget.
“I think if we try for 2 trillion, we’ve got a good shot at getting 1,” Musk declared last month, while acknowledging his goal was a “best-case outcome.”
NPR earned the billionaire’s wrath after the outlet repeatedly slammed him for buying Twitter in April 2022 with the goal of turning it into a free speech platform.
A year later, after NPR had published numerous articles lambasting Twitter, a fed-up Musk temporarily slapped a “state-affiliated media” label to NPR’s Twitter account.
When NPR complained, Musk responded to its email with a poop emoji.
“NPR operates independently of the U.S. government,” the outlet argued in April 2023. “And while federal money is important to the overall public media system, NPR gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources.”
NPR CEO John Lansing stated: “NPR stands for freedom of speech and holding the powerful accountable. It is unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way. A vigorous, vibrant free press is essential to the health of our democracy.”
In response, Twitter users reminded Lansing that NPR had an opportunity to hold the powerful Biden family accountable before the 2020 election, but passed because Hunter Biden’s laptop—which potentially exposed hundreds of Biden family crimes—was just a “distraction.”
The question is how much of public broadcasting is funded through USAID.