WASHINGTON—NPR announced last week that it’s suing the Trump administration over an executive order slashing its congressionally appropriated funding — a case that could have serious ramifications for the future of publicly-funded media.
But if Kat Cammack has her way, it won’t really matter.
The Florida congresswoman joined Senator Jim Banks to introduce the Defund NPR Act, which, if passed would codify Trump’s executive order, and ensure that “no Federal funds may, directly or indirectly, be made available to” outlets like NPR and PBS. Taxpayers spend around $535 million annually on NPR and PBS through federal funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Speaking to The Daily Wire this week, Cammack noted the absurdity of forcing taxpayers to fund public media outlets whose news content is “one giant editorial.”
“They’re not just biased — it’s effectively state-funded propaganda at this point, for the progressive left,” Cammack told The Daily Wire in a wide-ranging interview. “At the end of the day, taxpayers should not be funding propaganda, particularly one that has such an obvious political slant.”
Cammack’s bill is one part of the Republican Study Committee’s Set In Stone Initiative, an effort to “to transform President Trump’s executive victories into permanent legislation.” Three of Cammack’s fellow committee members — Reps. Claudia Tenney (NY), Ronny Jackson (TX), and Dale Strong (AL) have also introduced bills that would defund NPR and PBS.
Trump defunded NPR and PBS earlier this month, writing that “government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.” The president’s executive order followed the April release of a White House report cataloguing the “radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news,'” that NPR and PBS produce.
The White House’s efforts to defund public media were turbocharged by NPR CEO Katherine Maher’s disastrous testimony at a March congressional hearing, during which lawmakers grilled her on past social media posts exposing the executive’s liberal bias.
Now, NPR is fighting back, claiming in its lawsuit that Trump’s executive order is tantamount to “the government [acting] with a retaliatory purpose in violation of the First Amendment.” Cammack isn’t buying it.
“Spare me! You are the very same people who just said that the First Amendment is the largest impediment to censorship that they are trying to push. I mean, do they hear themselves?”
Cammack isn’t pulling punches — but that doesn’t mean she’s happy to see what’s become of American public broadcasting.
“I’m a millennial,” she says. “We grew up with Sesame Street, and it didn’t use to be this way where everything had a political slant.”
“It makes me sad,” Cammack adds. “You know, I’m seven months pregnant and I’m like, man, I’m gonna have to bust out old VHS tapes of Sesame Street or back when Sesame Street wasn’t so political.”
Ultimately though, it’s not so much the politics as the taxpayer-funded politics that irks Cammack. Taxpayer funding, she notes, “only accounts for such a small portion of [NPR and PBS’s] total overall budget, but that’s still too much, from a taxpayer standpoint.”
“They’re not gonna go straight off the air. And if they did, that would just be another ploy to try to gin up the public interest in this,” Cammack says.
“When we have $37 trillion in national debt, when Americans are struggling at the grocery store and the gas pump, we shouldn’t be on the hook” for public outlets that “want to push their continuous narrative and virtue signaling and make everyone feel like they’re a bunch of idiots.”
To Cammack, it all comes back to respecting and defending the taxpayers. Like any fiscal hawk worth their salt, she recoils at the notion that bureaucrats are held to different standards than the American people.
“I will always remember when I had to go get my first credit card,” Cammack says. “I was so religiously like, ‘I gotta pay this. I gotta pay it in full. I gotta do this.’”
Not so the federal government, who, Cammack notes, has “more credit cards and software licenses that are being used by government employees than there are government employees.”
“The math isn’t mathing!” she says.
“These are the unelected, nameless, faceless bureaucrats that basically run our government, like a shadow government,” she adds. “The scary part though, isn’t that that was happening. The scary part is that people are gonna fight us on cutting this out.”
People, perhaps — but not necessarily the American people. Even the most anti-Trump people she encounters in her district, she says, on some level admits “that there has just been rampant abuse across the board.”
“I still think at people’s core there’s a little bit of common sense,” she says. “I mean, the fact that you’re finding people on social security that are 167 — get me their nutritional plan!”
That core of common sense, she says, is why she has high hopes that the Department of Government Efficiency will continue to succeed long after Elon Musk’s departure.
“I think he has done a tremendous service to the country,” she says of Musk. “I mean, he really did it as a patriot.”
“He loves this country. But, let’s be real: the man wants to colonize Mars,” she says. “He started something. It’s now our job to finish it.”
It won’t be easy. Shortly before Cammack spoke to The Daily Wire, the United States Court of International Trade ruled that Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were illegal. The White House and its congressional allies have a long battle ahead.
But Cammack is no stranger to a fight. Perched behind a laptop emblazoned with a Gadsden Flag, Cammack uses her time on the House floor to take Democrats to task — forcing Biden administration officials to confront the brutal reality of human trafficking at the southern border, and introducing a bill to ban lawmakers from displaying foreign flags, a rebuke of her Democratic colleagues waving Ukrainian flags to support foreign aid.
(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
Once you’ve called Pete Buttigieg a liar on Face The Nation, calling out the federal judiciary is nothing.
“If we wanted judges to continually make all these decisions on behalf of the American people, we could just do away at that point with Congress and the presidency,” Cammack says, adding that the ability to levy tariffs is well within the president’s authority.
“The thing about judicial activism is it’s gotten more brazen over the years,” she adds. “And now you see it in full force.”
It’s serious stuff, and Cammack takes it seriously. But even she has to laugh at some of the reactions to Trump and his policies. Like the fact that Democrats and members of the media celebrating the tariff decision “never had anything to say when the Supreme Court ruled that Joe Biden couldn’t unilaterally forgive student loans.”
“This is what’s crazy to me: Joe Biden was spending money. Donald Trump is trying to save money. And so the courts are totally fine when you’re spending other people’s money.”
“But heaven forbid you get someone who’s actually trying to right the ship and save taxpayer money,” she laughs.
“Oh my gosh, the sky is falling!”
Shortly after the interview wrapped, a federal appeals court reinstated Trump’s tariffs.
