The Freedom From Religion Foundation is sounding the alarm on an underreported threat to democracy posed by Project 2025: its intention to defund and muzzle public broadcasting.
Pages 246–248 of Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership outline its scheme to end the status of NPR and Pacifica radio stations as “noncommercial education stations,” moving them from the desirable low end of the radio spectrum so religious programming can replace the prime 88 to 92 FM frequencies.
As the Madison, Wis.-based Capital Times’ columnist John Nichols notes, religious programming already claims roughly 42 percent of the airwaves that the Federal Communications Commission reserves for noncommercial broadcasting. Crippling public broadcasting would open the door to domination of the public airwaves by religious evangelism and Christian nationalist propaganda.
Project 2025, as most of the country knows by now, is a playbook that provides in great detail methods by which the incoming Trump administration can almost unilaterally uproot any government function or program that extremists disagree with, no matter how beneficial to the greater good. One of the programs that the radical agenda seeks to do away with is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting operates as a private nonprofit corporation and is the primary financial backer of public radio and television, using tax dollars to finance public media institutions to ensure that Americans have access to free, local public media, as the Index on Censorship explains. Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the group responsible for Project 2025, has laid out ways that the corporation can be eviscerated. Project 2025 calls for the defunding of public media, claiming it’s a “liberal forum for public affairs and journalism.” Translation: Project 2025 wants to root out professional journalism and voices of dissent and replace them with religious sycophants who will spew its propaganda.
Ironically, in its quest to censor public media, Project 2025 dares to quote the words of Thomas Jefferson: “To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.” Ironic because those words are the centerpiece of Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, which bars any public funding to promote religion. Yet replacing even-handed reporting with hate religion over public-supported airwaves is exactly what the Project 2025 schemers plan to do.
Since President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1967 State of the Union address in which he promoted the idea to “develop educational television into a vital public resource to enrich our homes, educate our families, and to provide assistance in our classrooms,” every Republican president has sought to strip funding from public media. Now, with the incoming Trump administration, the critics seem poised to finally get their wish.
Public broadcasting media has long been a cornerstone of democratic societies, providing citizens with access to free, high-quality information and educational content. Supported by public funds rather than commercial interests, public broadcasters prioritize public good over profit, allowing them to deliver content that is typically educational and nonpartisan. But reactionaries like Gonzalez, and the rest of the architects of Project 2025, see public broadcasting as a threat because they cannot dictate its content. Unlike the stooges at Fox News, Newsmax and X (formerly Twitter), public media cannot be bought and sold. The free flow of information is a threat to their messaging agenda and therefore they seek to destroy it.
Project 2025 also, according to Politico, seeks “to give the president complete power over quasi-independent agencies such as the Federal Communications Commission, which makes and enforces rules for television and internet companies that have been the bane of Trump’s political existence in the last few years.”
The fatal thrust, after defunding, would be Project 2025’s directive that NPR, PBS, Pacifica Radio and “other leftist broadcasters would be shorn of the presumption that they act in the public interest” and would no longer be eligible to be considered noncommercial education stations. They would have “zero claim on an educational function,” says Gonzalez in Project 2025. They would also be forced to pay licensing fees.
In the void left by the elimination of public media, journalistic news reporting and features would undoubtedly be replaced by “alternative facts” and Christian nationalist broadcasting. This has been the plan all along. The “Seven Mountain Mandate” calls on Christians to seize power in seven spheres: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business and government. Project 2025’s agenda seems perfectly aligned with that goal.
Local public radio stations are increasingly the only source of local news in many rural areas and other regions that unfortunately have become news deserts after the demise of many local newspapers. This makes public radio stations all the more important.
“The reason that Project 2025 extremists want to destroy public radio is because reliable information shared by citizens strengthens our democracy,” says FFRF Co-President Annie Laurie Gaylor. “We need a free press and unshackled media to act as a watchdog to keep citizens informed and involved.”
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a national nonprofit organization with 40,000 members and several chapters across the country. Our purposes are to protect the constitutional principle of separation between state and church, and to educate the public on matters relating to nontheism.
