Conservatives across the nation are marking a significant win with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s decision to shut down operations following the loss of its federal funding. The move comes after President Donald Trump signed a rescissions package last month that eliminated the CPB’s budget, fulfilling a long-standing Republican goal to end taxpayer support for what many view as partisan media outlets like NPR and PBS.
The CPB, established nearly 60 years ago to distribute federal funds to public broadcasters, confirmed in a statement that it will begin “an orderly wind-down of its operations.” Most employee positions will end by September 30, with a small team remaining to handle the transition through early 2026.
In its announcement, the organization reflected on its history: “For nearly 60 years, CPB has carried out its Congressional mission to build and sustain a trusted public media system that informs, educates, and serves communities across the country.” It added, “Through partnerships with local stations and producers, CPB has supported educational content, locally relevant journalism, emergency communications, cultural programming, and essential services for Americans in every community.”
CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison addressed the closure directly, stating, “we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations” despite attempts to preserve funding. She emphasized the organization’s role, saying,
“Public media has been one of the most trusted institutions in American life, providing educational opportunity, emergency alerts, civil discourse, and cultural connection to every corner of the country.” Harrison concluded, “We are deeply grateful to our partners across the system for their resilience, leadership, and unwavering dedication to serving the American people.”
Republican leaders in Congress wasted no time in hailing the development as a triumph for fiscal responsibility and an end to government-subsidized bias.
PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT
The days of the American people being forced to fund biased political outlets ARE OVER. https://t.co/1KHogux4o4
— Speaker Mike Johnson (@SpeakerJohnson) August 1, 2025
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, R-La., echoed that sentiment: “Proud to lead the rescissions package President Trump signed to finally pull the plug on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” he wrote. “$1.1B returned to taxpayers. No more public dollars for partisan propaganda. Republicans are ending wasteful spending and putting America First.”
Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, highlighted accountability issues, stating, “I exposed that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting failed to vet editorial standards at NPR, PBS, and other ‘news’ outlets before handing over millions of tax dollars for blatantly biased partisan propaganda. Bye bye bye,” accompanied by emojis signaling farewell.
WINNING!!
NPR & PBS have been DEFUNDED! 🪓💰
$535 MILLION in taxpayer dollars SAVED.
The American people shouldn’t be forced to pay for anti-American, left-wing propaganda.
They can hate us on their own dime now.@DOGECommittee https://t.co/1SpJN0koco
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) July 18, 2025
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, pointed out the freedom for broadcasters to continue without public money: “NPR and PBS are free to continue their biased programming. But not with your tax dollars. That’s done.”
Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., described the CPB as a conduit for improper use of funds: “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting—the scheme bureaucrats used to funnel taxpayer money to NPR and PBS—will soon be no more,” he said. “That’s great news for every American who doesn’t want their tax dollars funding left-wing opinion journalism EVER again.”
The enthusiasm extended beyond lawmakers to prominent conservative figures. Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk celebrated: “The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds NPR and PBS, has announced it will be shutting down after the BBB cut its half-a-billion-dollar budget. Bye-bye!”
National Review editor Philip Klein praised Trump’s resolve: “Amazing Friday news — Corporation for Public Broadcasting is shutting down. Credit to Trump for finally being willing to do what other Republicans were too afraid to do.”
NPR has finally been defunded
No more tax dollars for “non partisan” media that bashes half the country every single day
Why the hell should Republican tax dollars pay for media that attacks us?
No more pic.twitter.com/hJ5wbFoX6p
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) July 18, 2025
Other voices on X dismissed concerns about impacts on rural stations or programming. One user mocked liberal outcry: “The BBB passes libtards scream People are gonna die!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Funding for NPR and PBS gets cut Libtards scream People are gonna die !!!!!!!!!!!! I can’t wait to see what kills everyone next.” Another celebrated the shift to market-driven media: “The shackles are finally OFF, after 60 years, the CPB’s curtain call is here, and it’s a glorious pyre of taxpayer-funded propaganda going up in flames! Trump’s axe swung true, $1.1 billion chopped, and the ivory towers of NPR and PBS are trembling.”
While some outlets reported warnings from NPR and PBS about potential station closures and programming cuts, conservatives argue this exposes the inefficiency of relying on government handouts. NPR President Katherine Maher called it a “loss of a major institution,” but critics see it as an opportunity for private funding to support truly neutral content.
This closure represents a hard-fought correction to decades of compelled funding for media perceived as tilted against conservative values. With billions returned to taxpayers, the focus now turns to ensuring other wasteful programs face similar scrutiny.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
