Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
After days of debate, parliamentarian maneuvers, and more opportunities than we would frankly like for J.D. Vance to be at least nominally important to the national decision-making process, the United States Senate passed a bill in the early hours of Thursday morning that would defund the Corporation Of Public Broadcasting—the independent agency through which the government funds both PBS and NPR—to the tune of more than a billion dollars. The rescissions package—which also includes another $8 billion in cuts to favorite DOGE kicking target/foreign aid organization USAID—passed with a 51-48 margin, with Republican senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski breaking ranks with their party to vote against the bill. (Democratic Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota was hospitalized due to illness earlier on Wednesday, and missed the vote)
Per CNN, the bill will now be sent back to the House Of Representatives, which previously passed a slightly modified version, and which now has until Friday to pass the Senate’s amended take. (Otherwise it’ll become susceptible to Democratic filibuster; always nice to be reminded how much of our lived reality is dictated by these fiddly little rules.) If it passes, Donald Trump will have finally achieved his dream—dating back to his first term as President—of gutting NPR and PBS’s budgets in retaliation for saying mean things about him perceived bias. As many commentators have noted, the funding cuts will, somewhat ironically, probably be at least short-term weatherable for stations in big cities, where fundraising from private citizens is a workable model; it’ll be rural communities, where NPR and PBS represent small but vital services, including news, weather reporting, and emergency broadcasts, that’ll get hit the hardest. (Murkowski has stumped hard on this point over the past week, noting that, literally hours before the bill went up for a vote, Alaska’s public radio infrastructure had broadcast emergency warnings to residents about an earthquake in her home state.)
On the other hand, Trump has been mercilessly using this issue as his latest purity test to smack his wayward acolytes with, threatening to withhold support and funding from any Republican who doesn’t get in line on the bill. It appears to have worked—he might not be able to stop the base from screaming the word “Epstein!” every six minutes, but killing public TV and radio was apparently an easier ask.
