The latest round of proposed federal cuts to public media could eliminate $30 million annually in funding already budgeted for San Francisco public media like KQED and KALW.
The San Francisco-based Independent Television Service would lose 86 percent of its funding for the next two years if Congress approves the proposed rescissions. Others would lose from 7 to 10 percent of their funding.
President Donald Trump’s proposed rescissions of the federal budget, which he sent to Congress on June 3, call for $9.4 billion in cuts for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. Budgets for both of those years have already been passed by Congress, but rescission requires just a simple majority vote to pass. Congress has 45 days to approve the rescissions.
Cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — the federally funded nonprofit that distributes money to public media — total $1.1 billion over two years. This would eliminate federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, according to the proposal.
In San Francisco, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting supports public radio and television at KALW, KQED, the Independent Television Service and Northern California Public Radio with funds of nearly $30 million annually. Organizations were already preparing for cuts in future federal budgets, though the proposed rescissions move their timeline up.
And for ITVS, a PBS affiliate that produces the Independent Lens documentary series and has funded documentaries for public television since 1991, the cuts would be life-altering. The organization receives $19.7 million of its $23 million annual budget from the CPB.
Already this week, ITVS laid off 13 people, 20 percent of its staff, citing ongoing threats to future funds.
Darren LaShelle, president and CEO of Northern California Public Media, another organization affected by the cuts, said that the unknown future of federal funding limits the ability of public media companies to do their work today.
“It’s the uncertainty that’s really the most harmful thing,” LaShelle said. “Suddenly, you’re in survival mode instead of a mode of public service”
KALW, a San Francisco-based public radio station that launched in 1941 and hosts journalism-training programs, receives about seven percent of its $6 million annual operating budget from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Earlier this year, when the Trump Administration issued an executive order to block NPR and PBS stations from receiving federal money, KALW solicited donations from its listeners to help offset a potential loss of funding. But the slight uptick in donations that KALW saw from that campaign is a fraction of the $400,000 it could lose.
“The lack of knowledge is the hardest,” said James Kass, the executive director of KALW. “How many times can you say that the nightmare is at the door before you start to tune it out?”
Stations in the Bay Area say that their coverage would immediately be affected, and layoffs are likely to follow. For KALW, the loss of funding would likely cause it to slash its international news coverage and hire fewer local reporters, Kass said.
At Northern California Public Media, which caters to the North Bay but broadcasts via Sutro Tower on Bay Area television stations KRCB and KPJK, LaShelle warned that stripping the company’s funding could impact its Center for Environmental Reporting program, an initiative that grew out of community demand for more journalism on climate change and climate action.
“That federal funding is a great foundation for us to plan our future work that the people of the Bay Area have asked us to do,” he said. “We are not going to be able to replace that funding with local dollars.”
Northern California Public Media receives $600,000 of its $6 million annual budget from the federal government.
Bay Area NPR station KQED receives more money: $8 million annually, or 8 percent of its $100 million budget.
“Losing this federal funding will make the country less safe, impair access to free educational programming and resources for our youngest and most vulnerable children, and would erode public media’s ability to tell the stories of the people, places and history that are the fabric of our local communities,” Peter Cavagnaro, KQED’s director of communications and external affairs, wrote in a statement to Mission Local.