Rounds Expects Deal to Back CPB Rescission; Cantwell Worries About Emergency Alerts

Senate Commerce Committee ranking member Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., emphasized Wednesday that rescinding CPB’s advance funding for FY 2026 and FY 2027 could result in “nearly 13 million Americans [being] left without access to their public media stations and the life-saving emergency alerts or information they need.”

Cantwell’s comments appeared to target a handful of Senate Appropriations Committee Republicans who have raised concerns with language in the House-passed 2025 Rescissions Act (HR-4), which would claw back $1.1 billion allocated for CPB (see 2506250058). But at least one of those panel Republicans, Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, told us he believes there will likely be a solution that will allow the clawbacks to proceed without affecting public broadcasters’ emergency alert function.

“As people prepare for potential hurricanes, wildfires and other extreme weather events, we should not be gutting our support for public media,” Cantwell said. She based that argument on findings in her office’s June report on the potential effect of rescinding CPB’s funding. Her Wednesday comments came ahead of a likely Senate vote as soon as Monday on a motion to discharge HR-4 out of Senate Appropriations as an end-run to bring the bill to the floor. The House narrowly passed HR-4 in June (see 2506130025).

“Some rural areas depend on their local public media station as their only source of information in emergencies,” Cantwell’s office said Wednesday. “In severe storm and wildfire situations that knock out a community's power supply, TVs broadcasting news on the path of an incoming tornado may go dark due to power outages, and cell phones may lose service, leaving families with only local public radio broadcasts delivered to battery-powered, hand-crank, or car radios. Without local broadcasting, families in rural areas may not receive critical alerts in time to get to safety.”

Rounds told us that whether he supports rescinding the CPB funding “depends on whether or not we work out [a solution that means] we don’t lose these small-town radio stations across the country that [are] literally the only ways of getting out emergency messages. [But] I think we’ll get it worked out.” Rounds noted that White House OMB Director Russell Vought said during a Senate Appropriations hearing in June (see 2506260039) that the office “would work with us.”

An acceptable solution would need to preserve funds for emergency alerting functions to return to Native American and other rural radio stations without going through CPB, Rounds said. “It’s not a lot of money," but it allows those stations to be "the only way [a rural community] really has to announce and coordinate” during emergencies. “There’s a number of those stations across multiple states that will have this issue, and they’re not political in nature” in the way that Republicans claim CPB-funded NPR and PBS have become (see 2503260063), Rounds said.