‘A long road ahead of us’: Nevada public media prepares for federal cuts

Nevada’s public broadcasting stations are initiating emergency fundraising campaigns to maintain their services following Congress’ passage of $9 billion in cuts to foreign aid and public media.

Congress beat an end-of-day Friday deadline to pass President Donald Trump’s rescissions package, part of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to cut federal spending.

The vote marks a major win for Trump, who is the first president in decades to use an obscure presidential budget law to circumvent a Senate filibuster.

The rescissions package will cut $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which serves as a conduit for delivering federal funds to NPR, PBS and local stations. In Nevada, public broadcasters are set to lose more than $7.5 million, according to Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev.

Representatives of Nevada’s public broadcasters — including the Las Vegas and Reno PBS stations and KNPR — told the Las Vegas Review-Journal they are not planning on cutting staff or services and are working to mitigate the loss by seeking funding elsewhere.

Nevada broadcasting prepares for financial hits

Funding for public broadcasting makes up 0.01 percent of the federal budget and costs taxpayers $1.60 per year, said Kurt Mische, president and CEO of Reno PBS.

At Vegas PBS, 12 percent of its annual operating budget comes from federal funds delivered through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, according to Mare Mazur, president and general manager. The station will see a $3.8 million funding shortfall in fiscal years 2026 and 2027 due to the cuts.

She hopes to quickly pivot in order to mitigate the financial losses and hopefully continue its public workshops, she told the Review-Journal.

“Will we be able to offset some of these costs immediately? Certainly. Will we be able to sustain it? That’s difficult to know,” Mazur said.

Favian Perez, the CEO and president of Nevada Public Radio, said the loss of the federal funding represents about 8 percent of its funding, and the cuts will result in $400,000 less per year. KNPR has activated a fundraising campaign, and the next few months will be critical in finding replacement funding, Perez said.

He hopes KNPR will not get to the point where it has to look at its production and staffing, “but that’s something that I think we need to be appropriately planning for and appropriately looking ahead on.”

At PBS Reno, federal funds make up about 17 percent of its $7.3 million annual operating budget, according to Mische.

He highlighted some of his station’s work, from providing education programs for preschool and kindergarten-age children in Nevada to providing news information in broadband deserts where people might only have access to television.

Public broadcasting also provides emergency alert services across the country to inform the public in times of disasters, and representatives of PBS in Nevada said they’re hopeful they’ll be able to continue those services.

Mische said that equipment needs to be replaced from time-to-time, and he hopes there will be appropriations for it.

Targeting public media

President Trump has been vocal about his calls to defund PBS and NPR. On his social media, he encouraged all Republicans to vote for the rescissions bill and called the public broadcasting stations “worse than CNN & MSDNC put together.”

“Any Republican that votes to allow this monstrosity to continue broadcasting will not have my support or Endorsement,” he posted last week.

Some Republican senators have pointed to the country’s large debt as a reason for not continuing funding for public broadcasting. They accused organizations like NPR and PBS of being left-wing.

Mische said that argument is “as old as the hills,” and it’s not the first time public broadcasts were targeted by a president. He pointed to President Richard Nixon, who proposed cutting public broadcast funding from $20 million to $10 million. In 1969, Fred Rogers, host of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” testified before a Senate subcommittee to oppose the cuts.

Nevada’s congressional delegation has been supportive of maintaining public broadcasting funds. Nevada’s Democratic members of Congress voted against the rescissions package. The state’s sole Republican congressman, Rep. Mark Amodei, also originally voted against it in June but voted in favor of the package early Friday morning.

Amodei serves as the co-chair of the congressional Public Broadcasting Caucus.

When he first voted against the package in June, he said in a statement that he’d be doing a “disservice to the thousands of rural constituents in my district if I did not fight to keep their access to the rest of the world and news on the air.”

Federal funding still possible

There will be at least three more opportunities to ensure local broadcasting is still supported, such as through the appropriations committee markup process, Amodei said in a Friday statement.

“We still have a long road ahead of us before the start of the next fiscal year, and I will continue to fight for our local broadcasters in the months ahead,” he said.

Mazur with Vegas PBS said the goal is not just to stay on-air, but to continue providing services.

“I don’t know what we’ll look like in five years. I know we’ll be here, but I don’t know what that will be,” she said.

Mische with Reno PBS said his organization is being careful with its budget planning.

“I think at the end of the day we will come out the other side, because a majority of Americans like and want public television,” he said. “They don’t like it when people beat up on Big Bird.”

Contact Jessica Hill at jehill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @jess_hillyeah on X.