Arizona PBS General Manager reacts to Senate’s approval of Rescissions Act 2025

Update: On Friday, July 18, 2025, the U.S. House gave final approval to President Donald Trump’s request to claw back approximately $9 billion for public broadcasting and foreign aid. The House passed the bill by a vote of 216-213. It now goes to President Trump for his signature.

The U.S. Senate has approved the Trump Administration’s rescission request of $9 billion for public broadcast funding and foreign aid programs. The Rescission Act still has to pass through the House before it can become law.

The request, which passed the Senate on a 51 to 48 vote, will claw back $1.1 billion already approved funds for PBS, NPR and other forms of public media.

Scott Woelfel, General Manager of Arizona PBS, joined “Arizona Horizon” to explain how the loss of funding will impact public media and how Arizonans can help local stations.

According to Woelfel, the funding cuts would be felt in Arizona PBS due to the amount at risk. “It’s about $2.3 million per year, which is around 13% of our budget, so it’s a very significant cut,” Woelfel said.

Woelfel emphasized however that this was an outcome the station had been planning for in advance of potential cuts. “We’re operating under a reduced budget already in anticipation that this could happen,” Woelfel said. “Much work will be done throughout the course of the year to make sure that we can keep those expenses down until we find new sources of revenue.” 

This will mean some changes to content and project plans at the station, such as more reruns of shows. “It means delaying some projects that we wanted to undertake,’ Woelfel said. “It’ll mean buying less programming.”

As for other public broadcasting stations in Arizona, especially more rural and smaller ones, the danger of the federal funding cuts is even greater to them. “Smaller stations are gonna be hit much harder,” Woelfel said. “As I said, it’s about 13% of our budget. Smaller stations could be 40%, 50%, even 60% of the budget.”

“I’m afraid to say we’re probably gonna see a lot of them fall by the wayside.”

The fight for keeping the lights on at public media is not over, however. The negotiations for the next federal budget are starting this fall, and efforts to get new funding for public media in them will be attempted. “The battle for that will start in the fall for the October 1 budget, which never is passed by October 1,” Woelfel said.

“We will try again at that point to get this funding put into the new budget and so that we’re currently funded instead of advanced funded. So we don’t know if our efforts will pay off, but we’re certainly going to try.”