With the U.S. Senate voting to defund both the Public Broadcasting Service and National Public Radio, what losses will the American people suffer without tax dollars going towards two largely politicized networks that take their money only to push partisan narratives that favor Democrats?
According to Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy, not much.
Whatever arguments existed for the practical purpose of those networks — namely NPR for Roy’s case — the Texas congressman dispelled them in noting how useless it was during the devastating Texas floods that now have a death toll of 135.
On Thursday, Roy posted footage of himself to his social media platform X account, stating the effectiveness — or lack thereof — in Texas Public Radio taking an absurd 19 hours to post any warning or alert about the floods.
Rep. Roy: “When the floods were hitting the people that I represent, it took NPR through Texas Public Radio 19 hours to post anything about the flooding on its social media.
What was NPR and TPR doing in the interim? They were playing a program, a DC based program, lobbying… pic.twitter.com/IyZYPFq5SS
— Rep. Chip Roy Press Office (@RepChipRoy) July 17, 2025
“There’s a lot of folks here, talking about and extolling the virtues of NPR, PBS, public broadcasting, so forth and talked about how cutting their funding is somehow going to endanger communities and rural communities,” Roy said in a hearing.
“Well, when the floods were hitting the people that I represent, it took NPR through Texas Public Radio 19 hours to post anything about the flooding on its social media. What was NPR and TPR doing in the interim?” Roy asked before telling the room that private stations were covering the disaster as it was clearly the top priority.
“They were playing a program, a D.C.-based program, lobbying congress for billions of dollars to continue their funding. When the flood hit at four in the morning, instead of providing local news,” Roy explained, a pre-taped “Morning Edition” from Washington D.C. was being played.
Do NPR and PBS deserve public funding?
“They didn’t break in like the local stations did and so forth. The seven private stations posted over 70 alerts on their social pages throughout the day started at 7:24 in the morning.
“My point being, private stations in the communities in which I live were there for the people of Texas. They were there presenting the information necessary, and the public stations were completely MIA.”
This looks pretty bad for NPR and cuts the legs from underneath its argument that it provides a necessary service.
When a disaster like the one seen in Texas strikes, seconds matter.
Leftists can drone on about President Donald Trump‘s cuts to the federal workforce exacerbating the issue when it comes to the National Weather Service and so forth, but where were NPR and TPR?
They were apparently groveling for money rather than proving why they needed it.
Democrats would bemoan less tax dollars going to NPR.
Former senior business editor for NPR Uri Berliner outed the network for their growing bias in recent years in April 2024, detailing how the network pushed the Russia-collusion hoax against Trump, refused to pursue the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop, refused to entertain the origins of COVID-19 being from a lab in Wuhan, China, and decided to take the side of the screaming mob, implementing backwards race-based trainings in the wake of George Floyd’s death in 2020.
That’s all to say, left-wing talking points became NPR talking points.
This is no longer a network for all the American people, so why should they fund it?
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