Sen. Klobuchar Against Proposal Clawing Back Public Media Funding

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote next week on a rescission package from the White House that would take back funding that has already been approved for international aid and public broadcasting.

The cuts include $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Those cuts would impact rural public television stations particularly hard—for instance, Lakeland PBS would lose 37% of its overall funding.

Yesterday, several Democratic senators, including Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, spoke on the Senate floor about why they are against the cuts to public broadcasting. Sen. Klobuchar later spoke with Lakeland News about where things stand on a possible vote.

“You know, it is kind of a jump ball in the Senate,” she said. “And I know for your viewers that isn’t a good answer, but it’s a better answer than saying it’s going to pass for sure, because what this does is it rescinds funding that Congress has already set aside.

“There are so many good arguments to make for the way that this funding helps, especially local communities, stay together,” continued Klobuchar. “It’s the glue where they know about the parades or they know about what’s happening with the business in their town. And so that’s the case we’re making now, and we have had some Republicans in the Senate say they want to find a way to at least carve this out.”

Klobuchar says she’s against taking back funding that has already been approved and feels there are several ways this could go next week.

“This is money that a Republican House and a Democratic Senate came together and had negotiations with strong support on both sides of the aisle, and voted for a budget that included these funds,” she emphasized. “So once you start just saying, ‘Hey, we don’t like what we did last year,’ you’re basically ruining the independence of a branch of government. So they might decide that they’re going to carve some stuff out and vote for it. It just depends on what it is, or we’ll just get rid of the whole bill or they’ll pass it. And so right now we are working with Republicans.”

She added, “But this is just taking an agreement that was already made, and certainly a great detriment in a sudden way to the people who are relying on it in the case that I made on the communities that are going to be affected, with suddenly less programing or even no stations of public TV or public radio.”

The deadline to vote on the rescission package is July 18th.