Less Than 1/4 of Americans Want to Defund NPR and PBS

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan

President Donald Trump and his allies have railed against NPR and PBS for years, accusing them of bias, targeting them with investigations, and threatening to cut off taxpayer funding. But a new Pew Research Center poll shows that is not what a majority of Americans want, even among Republicans.

GOP complaints about NPR and PBS were highlighted Wednesday at a hearing for the House Department of Government Efficiency Committee (DOGE), which is chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Republicans have sponsored legislation that would cut off federal funding for public broadcasting stations, a tactic that’s been tried before but that has a far more “intense” backing this time around, according to Semafor’s Max Tani.

Still, Republican efforts to financially starve public broadcasters may struggle to find support from their constituents. A new Pew Research Center poll found that less than a quarter of Americans wanted NPR and PBS to lose their federal funding.

Specifically, 43% supported continuing to fund NPR and PBS, 24% wanted to remove funding, and 33% were not sure.

Graphic via Pew Research Center.

Unsurprisingly, the numbers showed a strong partisan division, but even among Republicans and independents who lean Republican, less than half (44%) were on board with cutting off funds. In this Republican/lean Republican group, 19% supported continued funding and 37% replied not sure. With Democrats/lean Democratic, the figures skewed the other way, with 69% supporting continued funding, 5% wanting funding cut off, and 26% not sure.

As Pew’s report noted, NPR and PBS have “complicated” funding structures, and do take in a majority of their revenue outside of the government funding, including corporate sponsorships and membership donations to the national and local stations. Still, the federal funding that is routed through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) adds up to $535 million annually, and that would be a significant loss for the broadcasters’ budgets.

The poll was conducted online and with live telephone interviews in both English and Spanish of 9,482 U.S. adults from March 10 through 16, 2025, with the sample weighted to be representative of the national U.S. population in terms of education, partisan affiliation, demographics, and other factors. The margin of error for the whole sample was +/- 1.4 percentage points.

Read the poll report from Pew Research Center here.