FCC’s Brendan Carr also suggests an investigation could be relevant to conservative congressional efforts to defund the public broadcasters.

President Donald Trump’s newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission has ordered an investigation into NPR and PBS over their alleged “airing of commercials,” and suggested that the public broadcasters could be at risk of losing their federal funding.
“I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcasts could be violating federal law by airing commercials,” Brendan Carr wrote to the heads of both organizations Wednesday. “In particular, it is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements.”
In the letter, Carr said Congress is “actively considering whether to stop” funding NPR and PBS programming, which it has done since the 1967 passage of the Public Broadcasting Act. The query into the broadcasters could be relevant to such funding considerations, he said.
According to NPR, the broadcasting organization receives about 1 percent of its annual budget directly from the federal government; its member stations on average get 10 percent of their funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which stewards congressional money. PBS told The Washington Post that 16 percent of its budget comes from the government.
“For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS given the changes in the media marketplace,” Carr added.
An “underwriting announcement” is an acknowledgment by broadcasting stations of who their sponsors are. Under FCC guidelines, a station can share a sponsor’s name, a general description of what they do and where they’re located. Unlike a typical commercial spot, these announcements are supposed to stop short of a “call to action” telling or trying to entice audiences to buy a product or service.
In a public statement shared Thursday, NPR chief executive Katherine Maher defended the organization’s practices, saying they comply with federal regulations. “We are confident any review of our programming and underwriting practices will confirm NPR’s adherence to these rules,” she said.
Jason Phelps, a spokesman for PBS, shared a statement noting the organization’s pride in its programming. “We work diligently to comply with the FCC’s underwriting regulations and welcome the opportunity to demonstrate that to the Commission,” the statement read.
As of Friday afternoon, the office of FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, a Democrat, had yet to receive a copy of Carr’s letter, despite multiple requests to the chairman’s office.
“This appears to be yet another Administration effort to weaponize the power of the FCC,” Gomez said in an X post Thursday. “The FCC has no business intimidating and silencing broadcast media.”
Carr’s letter is the latest in Trump’s and his allies’ clashes with the media.
Last week, Carr revived a trio of complaints from the law firm Center for American Rights aimed at NBC, ABC and CBS. The center has alleged bias in the networks’ coverage of the 2024 election, including accusing NBC of violating equal time rules when Vice President Kamala Harris made a cameo appearance on “Saturday Night Live” in the lead-up to Election Day. (Carr’s predecessor, Jessica Rosenworcel, recently dismissed these complaints.)
Andrew Jay Schwartzman, a public interest media lawyer who has brought cases before the FCC, said Carr’s letter was concerning.
“This is rather obviously intended to be a message to intimidate local broadcasters and their politically sensitive boards of directors,” Schwartzman said, adding that the letter gives the appearance that Carr is “acting as if he is under the command of the Trump administration.”
“This lack of independence is troublesome,” he added.
Although the president appoints the FCC chair, the agency is officially an independent, bipartisan agency overseen by Congress and tasked with enforcing broadcast rules. The FCC has fined broadcasters — typically smaller public stations in rural areas, said Schwartzman — when they have overstepped advertising regulations.
For the most part, though, Schwartzman said, “noncommercial broadcasters are very careful to paint within the lines.”
The agency’s independence has been watered down over the years under both Republican and Democratic administrations, said Marc Martin, a partner at the law firm Perkins Coie who closely follows changes in FCC regulations. (Martin also worked at the FCC as a staff attorney under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.)
“President Trump named someone that he thought would carry out his policies,” Martin said. “It’s no great shock that now [Carr’s] actually doing what he said he would do.”
The FCC can’t defund public broadcasters, but as Carr said in his letter, an investigation could give Congress the rationale to do so.
Carr, who was a Republican commissioner at the FCC before being tapped to lead it, wrote the chapter on the regulatory agency in Project 2025, a detailed policy proposal developed by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. (Project 2025 has a separate chapter on defunding public broadcasting networks.) He has previously shared concerns about the major broadcast networks’ conduct during the 2024 campaign.
Carr has also vowed to “smash the censorship cartel” and said he would prioritize stopping social media companies and “narrative checkers” from suppressing conservative views.
“I don’t think he hid the ball,” Martin said. “He plans to be a part of carrying out the administration’s policy priorities.”
Conservative politicians have long sought to defund public broadcasting, citing ideological reasons as well as concerns about perceived liberal bias.
In his first term, Trump attempted several times to cut funding to public television and radio via his budget proposals, as well as funding for the arts, libraries and museums. (A Washington Post analysis from 2017 found that these cultural programs made up just 0.02 percent of federal spending.)
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