Exclusive—Sen. Jim Banks: Taxpayers Should Not Be Giving NPR Another Dime

It’s one thing to talk a good game when it comes to cutting spending in Washington. But it’s another thing to actually do something about that. The American people are sick and tired of seeing their tax dollars squandered, and nothing reeks of Permanent Washington more than reckless spending and government waste.

This is a big week on Capitol Hill. The Senate is working with President Donald Trump to pass a rescissions package that cuts billions in unnecessary spending and makes the DOGE cuts permanent. This rescissions package before us defunds $1.1 billion for the left-wing Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which uses Americans’ tax dollars to fund radical outlets like National Public Radio (NPR).

This should be a no-brainer. We should not be giving NPR another dime for its liberal propaganda masquerading as “news.”

That is why one of the first bills I introduced when I got to the Senate just a few months ago was my Defund NPR Act, which does just that. The American people’s tax dollars should not be forced to fund NPR’s liberal bias. If NPR cannot stay afloat without the government’s help, then that tells you all you need to know.

Let’s review the facts:

In 2020, NPR branded the Hunter Biden laptop story as a “waste of time.” Meanwhile, NPR had no problem covering the fake Steele dossier as part of the Russian collusion hoax meant to hurt President Trump during his first term in office.

Let’s also not forget that NPR not only dismissed the COVID lab leak theory, claiming it had been “debunked.”

You can’t make this up.

As if that weren’t bad enough, NPR’s new CEO, Katharine Maher, said back in 2020 that the “number one challenge here [to censoring Americans] that we see is, of course, the First Amendment in the United States.” Maher believes that “our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that’s getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done.”

Why exactly should the American people be writing her paychecks with their tax dollars?

Unfortunately, it only gets worse. According to Uri Berliner, a 25-year NPR veteran who resigned last year, NPR’s woke editors monitor reporters’ interviewees, run “unconscious bias” training sessions, and host employee affinity groups, including a “Marginalized Genders and Intersex People of Color mentorship program” and a group for “Latinx employees at NPR.”

Meanwhile, here’s just some examples of NPR’s “hard-hitting journalism” in the last few years, paid for with your tax dollars: A documentary condemning Teddy Roosevelt’s statue in New York City as “racist”; a news feature titled “What ‘Queer Ducks’ can teach teenagers about sexuality in the animal kingdom”; and a Valentine’s feature around “queer animals.”

The problem is not that NPR doesn’t resonate with the American people. It’s that NPR actively despises the American people, forcing them to subsidize its liberal propaganda with their tax dollars. As Katherine Maher herself said in a now deleted tweet, “Donald Trump is a racist.” I bet she and her colleagues feel the same way about President Trump’s supporters.

That is why this vote on President Trump’s rescissions package matters. Defunding NPR and these special interests are one of the more important parts of President Trump’s agenda in shaking up the status quo here in Washington. The American people’s tax dollars have funded groups like NPR for decades that have little to nothing to do most of the time with improving the American people’s day-to-day lives.

I’m glad that we finally have a president who is serious about putting an end to NPR’s free ride at the taxpayer’s expense. We finally have a president who is serious about putting the American people first and making sure that their tax dollars are being spent wisely.

That is why I am proud to stand with President Trump and my colleagues here in the Senate on getting this rescissions package over the finish line.

Jim Banks is a U.S. Senator from Indiana.