🔰Amy Klobuchar Decries Trump Administration's Cuts To Public Broadcasting And Radio Funding

I rise today in strong opposition to the President's request to Congress this week to eliminate $9.4 billion in funding that has already been passed and signed into law. Let's say that again. Already passed, signed into law. Anyone that watches Schoolhouse Rock, listens to the song Know, how a bill becomes a law. A Republican-led House, at the time a Democratic-led Senate, came together, made an agreement, passed the bill, signed into law by the then President. But this President thinks he can just come in and change everything when it comes to really important things for people in this country that I'm about to get to. That's just not how it works. We got to do our jobs and people need to stand up and say, this is our part of the job. We make the decisions about the funding. The President can veto them. He can work with us as, you know, we could be doing right now. Instead, it's just a one pony show. But that's how this place works. So what this proposal would do, we've got funding that's already been appropriated for broadcasting, public broadcasting, and slash critical international aid funding. Programs that have long had bipartisan support. I'm the daughter of a newspaperman. I care a lot about people getting information, getting news. And right now I care a lot about it in rural America. Because there has been such a breakdown of news coverage, of small newspapers that have folded in part because we won't do anything about the social media companies, about Facebook and Google and how they're able to use the content without being reimbursed. Just let it sit there as their lobbyists come in and stop it. But while we're doing that, in a lot of these areas now, the only news, the only way for them to find out about what's going on with a storm or what's happening with a wildfire or what's even happening with their local softball team or what's happening with the high school or what business is opening or closing is through these sources of public radio and public TV. Public broadcasting reaches nearly 99% of Americans with free programming, delivering life-saving emergency alerts, vital local news and shows that talk about what's actually happening locally and what's true and what's happening and what events are going on and when they can attend the school fair, all those kinds of things. But President Trump has decided to try to claw back the money Congress has already provided, I guess to pay for these tax cuts for the wealthiest, but to try to claw it back for over 1,500 local and regional public TV and radio stations throughout the country. Many of these stations provide free high-quality programming to millions of households in rural areas. A lot of them don't even have what they need to see it online, and this is actually how they get their news. But even without that, they're in their cars a lot, they have long ways to drive, they get a lot of stuff off the radio. I know that in my state, this would be particularly devastating, we have a lot of rural areas. Minnesota has a long history of public radio and TV programming. Every week, 20 million people across the country listen to the Minnesota public radio programs that were originally produced by Marketplace, right, since 1967. Its award-winning news operation has documented some of the most important stories of our time. Minnesotans coming from Cambodia, what was happening there, it was public radio that was covering that. In 1988, NPR's Main Street Radio produced a documentary called Against the Grain, which gave rural Minnesotans the mic to talk about how they were handling economic change. In 2007, NPR News covered every detail of the collapse of the 35W Bridge, which was of course also warnings to people about where they had to go, what was happening, what was closed down. They're covering research on dementia, state plans for K-12 education, the legislative session right now, both the public TV and public radio station are diligently covering every single detail of that, while so many other news organizations have gone away or broken down. What do we want to have? No coverage of a city council in Bemidji, Minnesota? We don't want to know what's happening on Main Street? We don't want to know when a flood comes in? What stores are open and when? Why would we decide to cut ourselves off from information at this moment in time? Public TV, the pace where so many people get their news, 58% of households watch PBS programming in a year. PBS Kids, 15 million monthly viewers of PBS Kids. And yeah, that's right, they don't get exposed to all the advertising, all the stuff they'd see online because they're watching the PBS Kids. I think that's actually a pretty cool thing for our country, that there's a place that kids can watch these programs. Every month, 36 million Americans watch their local PBS. I was just at KMSQ-TV in Austin, Minnesota, I'm sure most of the people haven't heard of it. But boy, the people in Austin, it's pretty important. Tens of thousands of people, that's where they get their news, 72% local carry. The former Republican Senate leader in the state Senate, he's on the board. Because they know this is a place they can find out about local news or what's happening. It's where they can find out about local news in places like Granite Falls, Minnesota, in places like Bemidji, Minnesota. All across the country in times of crisis, public radio and TV are essential to public safety. While many other news sources lost power and internet during Hurricane Helene, Asheville's Blue Ridge Public Radio stayed online, bringing life-saving news and information to the over 500,000 people in the region without power. When Hurricane Milton devastated the Tampa area, the local public station, WSF, hosted live call-in shows, aired frequent local news briefings, and maintained a regularly updated live blog with a text-only low-bandwidth option to keep residents informed and safe before and after the storm. I have been in so many areas of my state in a time of crisis, of flooding, where you go down there and the mayor in a real small town is sitting there, but he's live streaming on their local public access. Because that's the way, where else are people going to go? Are they going to try 80 different platforms on social media? Are they going to go and try to figure out which local TV station in the Twin Cities, miles away, are maybe showing something every so often about their problems? They go to public access, purely for safety's sake, much less for kids seeing really good programming that's free of all the commercial aspects that come in kids' ways every single day or the interesting in-depth kind of reporting you can have on a place like Marketplace for what's happening with the economy, or something to listen to when you're driving for hours and hours and hours that doesn't mean endless ads and endless marketing, because you actually get to hear the news, or you actually get to hear some music you like. That's what public TV and public radio do for us. It's a treasure in our country. Public broadcasting creates a more informed community through quality programming on local and national events, and I think it's really going to be important as we debate this in the next few weeks to remember that local part. It shines a light on the people, places, history, and stories that are the fabric of towns and cities addressing the most pressing issues. We must support these vital resources that give voice to important local issues that wouldn't otherwise be heard. They're going to be lost to history. It's going to be a further erosion of the fabric. So what do people do instead? Oh, go look on Twitter and see if you can protect your kids from a bunch of bad stuff that's on there. I use that. A bunch of us in here, almost all of us, have accounts, an important way to reach people. I'm not cutting it down, but I'd much rather have a kid in my state be watching the programming on public radio than looking on social media accounts right now or be watching it on public TV and listening to the radio. It's a safe space for them to get some programming. The President's request would also deepen the damage this administration has done to our standing in the world through reckless cuts to foreign aid. To give you one example, the President would impose major cuts to PEPFAR, the program that began under President George W. Bush to prevent the spread of HIV AIDS. Over many years, this program has earned consistent bipartisan support across four administrations and 10 Congresses. It's credited with saving over 25 million lives. These programs not only demonstrate Americans' humanitarian leadership, which certainly helps when you need a friend, when there's a conflict going on abroad, and you can point to things that you did working with other countries. They also are good for our country. We know that you just can't bury your head in the sand and hope that these problems in other countries and diseases aren't heading your way. Whether it's Ebola or malaria or bird flu, oftentimes these things come in from other countries. Pandemic, right? They come in from other countries. So why would we at this moment in time cut off our investments in public health and in food aid and other things that are not only right based on your belief that we're part of this world and your faith or whatever makes you believe that if we can save some lives for a small part of the federal budget in America, because we're so good at innovation and we're so good at producing things, and yes, we have some extra food, and yes, we have some rural economy that we want to keep strong. But also just from a purely American selfish version of this, and I don't mean selfish like a bad thing. I mean selfish like looking out for ourselves and our country. You would want to work with the rest of the world so these diseases doesn't come in your doors or you don't shut out and anger other countries when 90% of our potential customers are outside of our borders. You want to be able to sell stuff to them, but not if we cut ourselves off from the rest of the world and make fun of them and call them the 51st state. The president's proposed cuts to funding for UNICEF are also misguided. I was one of those kids at Halloween that would go trick-or-treating. I'd have my bag in this little UNICEF box that people would put some pennies in, and I learned how much that each of those dimes would mean for food for kids in other countries. We should be at the forefront of supporting brighter futures for children facing the hardships of poverty so the next generation can build strong societies and become close partners with the United States. Think about people that study in our colleges and graduate schools from other countries. Think about what they offer us. Yeah, they pay their way a lot of the time. That helps colleges. But you know what else they do? Sometimes they stay. Sometimes they stay for a few years. Basically they're getting advanced degrees. They're getting skills that we want them to get. And sometimes we want them to stay in our country. In my mind, we should be stapling a green card to their diplomas. And that is how when you look at Fortune 500 companies in our country and who's headed it up, a huge amount of them are immigrants or kids of immigrants that were educated in our country. That's such a big part of our economy and our advantage across the world. Why would we be cutting off? Or they go back to their home country and say, you know, I kind of liked it there. They start a business. Then they do business with our country. That's how this is work. American businesses need access to emerging markets. Many countries that have received US assistance have become important American trading partners. The connection between foreign assistance and American prosperity is especially clear in agriculture. America has probably fed the world for decades and food aid has been a critical component of that effort. Food aid is a significant market for American farmers, purchasing over 4.25 billion in American commodities from 20 to 24. Minnesota's farmers and ag businesses sold a total of $70 million in ag products to USAID's Food for Peace program in 2024 alone. Continuing this aid should not be a partisan issue. It never has. Or we never would have gotten it done for all these years. It has been completely bipartisan. Some people come at it, as I said, because of their faith and their belief in helping the world. Some people come at it in terms of economics and think this is how we help people and then this opened the markets for us. Some people come at it from a security standpoint, which I mentioned with health, but also applies in other ways. If you help people and you are their friends, it can lead to good things down the line. Mr. President, cutting funding for this international aid, not to mention cutting ourselves off from the information we need, especially in rural areas that so often in news deserts rely on public radio and public TV for their information, is sending our democracy backwards at a time when we are completely connected and should be connected to the rest of the world. These investments, compared to the rest of the federal budget, aren't as big, but their influence in the immediate and in the long term is immense. They strengthen our country at home and strengthen American leadership around the world. This is a test of our values, yeah, but it is also economically the right thing to do to keep a fragmented country that is ever divided, someone on the same plane by their kids having a public TV program to watch and learn from, from their community being able to tune in and watch a local sports game or able to get their news about what happened on their city council and talk about it the next day. So one person says, I don't know what happened. I read this on Facebook and the other person said, no, that's not true. I actually saw the local news in Austin and I saw what it said on our local public TV network. They don't even maybe know what that is, but they know what it is. And this is what I found out. That's how people can come to some common agreement about what's happening in our world. And there's no better place to start than on a local level, which is why when you talk to Republican or Democratic mayors or city council members, they'll tell you if we don't have that, how are we ever going to debate this levy proposal? Are we ever going to get people to understand why we have to make a decision about the school and whether we close it down or whether we expand it or whether we close another school down? How are they ever going to have that without a public access station? In this day and age, this idea that we are, what are we going to do? Just expect everyone to go out when they've got three kids, they're supposed to go out to every single meeting and watch it themselves, or they're supposed to rely that maybe it's going to get the right information on Twitter, but they're not sure if that person telling the truth or that person's telling the truth. Or we are going to give them the first front line of information, which is what C-SPAN does, by the way, which is why Senator Grassley and I are trying to make sure that we get that C-SPAN on platforms like YouTube, owned by Google, by Hulu, owned by Disney in the modern day. And same thing here. I want to make sure there are some sources where people can gather and look at this news and know they're getting something quality, know they're getting something either that entertains them with music, without every single song having an ad in the middle of it, and that they're able to get the news they need to be good citizens of this great country. That's what's on the line with these rescissions. I yield the floor.