It has been five months since President Trump halted federal funding for the organization that helped fund National Public Radio and PBS. What most people don’t know is that the campus radio station has been affected, as well.
In July, Congress passed the Rescissions Act of 2025, which clawed back $1.1 billion in funding that had been allocated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for the 2026 and 2027 fiscal years.
It was the first time in 60 years that Congress failed to fund the CPB, an organization that distributes federal dollars to public radio and television stations nationwide. The defunding has affected many local public radio stations, including KACU-FM, which is owned by the university.
“Two years ago, they approved money for the public radio system,” said Heather Claborn, KACU general manager. “Then in January, the president let people know that he was going to send a memo to Congress to ask them to take the money back that they’d already approved.”
That funding, Claborn explained, was already in the U.S. Treasury waiting to be distributed. When the rescission package reached Congress, both the House and Senate narrowly approved it, ultimately stripping the CPB of its budget.
The administration defended the decision as a matter of independence and fairness.
“Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence,” Trump said in his executive order in May.
While large public radio stations in big cities often rely on multiple revenue streams, smaller stations like KACU have taken a much harder hit.
“For us, it was about 31% of our revenue that we lost,” Claborn said. “That’s huge.”
Larger stations, she added, were able to quickly launch emergency fundraising campaigns that brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars in just days. KACU, however, doesn’t have the staffing or resources to pull off such rapid campaigns. Abilene is a smaller market that lacks the deep financial resources many larger cities have. Instead, the station is turning to its traditional fall and spring fundraising drives, local corporate support and grant-writing to replace the lost funding.
“My goal as the station manager is to preserve our local service,” Claborn said. “The last thing that we would do is cut the local service that we provide the community, because that’s really the value that we have as a public radio station.”
To ease the blow, NPR cut its own budget by 8% and offered deep discounts on programming fees for smaller stations. Nonprofits are also exploring ways to support the most vulnerable outlets.
Next year, KACU will celebrate its 40th anniversary as an NPR-affiliated station, and plans to launch a campaign to build long-term financial stability. Over the past four decades, the station has trained more than 150 students who have gone on to work across the media industry.
“There are people who will work toward supporting public broadcasting,” Claborn said. “But I think once you lose that type of grant funding, it’s really hard to get it back. So we’re really looking at restructuring the way we support the system at the local level as well as the national level.”
For KACU, the challenge now is turning community loyalty into financial support as public broadcasting adjusts to a new era without federal aid.
