In a major victory for President Trump, Congress has approved a rescission package clawing back $9 billion in federal funds for priorities he deemed wasteful, including $8 billion allocated for foreign aid and $1.1 billion previously appropriated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which helps fund PBS and NPR and member stations like GBH.

“I’m incredibly disappointed and think it was a very shortsighted decision for the United States,” said Susan Goldberg, GBH’s president and CEO.

While Goldberg noted that some member stations might have to shut down due to significant funding losses, particularly smaller stations in rural areas, she stressed that GBH will continue operating, albeit in a significantly changed media landscape.

“GBH is going to survive,” Goldberg said. “I’m not saying that it’s going to be exactly the way it is now, but we are going to survive.

“Sometimes hard times push innovation, and people can find in adversity the determination to speed along some of the innovation that needed to happen all along,” she added. “We’re creative people. We’ve been on the cutting edge of innovation for 75 years at GBH. And that muscle memory and those reflexes will serve us well at this moment.”

GBH was slated to receive about 8% of its budget from the CPB in Fiscal Year 2026, which begins in October. That money — which amounts to $18 million dollars — will now be gone.

That number alone doesn’t fully capture how disruptive the rescission will be to GBH’s operations, though. Goldberg noted that GBH is one of just a few PBS affiliates that produce content for the entire system. PBS provides GBH with funding to make shows like FRONTLINE, NOVA, American Experience, Antiques Roadshow and Masterpiece. That funding, in turn, comes from dues paid to PBS by member stations, some of which may now cease to exist.

“This is such a seismic event that we really need to consider everything — what we’re making, how we’re making it, how frequently we’re making it, and what platforms we’re making it for,” Goldberg said.

GBH cut 54 workers this year and laid off 31 employees in 2024, when the organization was facing a $7 million budget gap.

Asked if more layoffs would be forthcoming now that the rescission package has been approved, Goldberg said, “We’re going to have to figure out how to be more efficient — what work we’re absolutely doubling down on or, on the other hand, are there some things that we’re doing that when you have to prioritize a bit, you have to say, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t do that anymore?’

“That is the discussion that we’re going to be having here. And the sad part is, this is the discussion that is going to go on in every single community in this country, because every community in this country is served by public media.

“Public media reaches like 99% of the population, and it offers information for free, for people of all ages and stages and ZIP Codes and economic class[es] — it doesn’t discriminate against anybody,” she said.

Before the rescission package passed, the Trump administration had already canceled grants that GBH used to develop educational children’s programming, Goldberg said, a move she described as having massive implications for children across the United States.

“Half the kids in the country do not get to go to pre-K, so they kind of start out in a hole on that first day of kindergarten,” she said. “And it’s watching shows like ‘Arthur’and ‘Work It Out Wombats!’ and ‘Molly of Denali’ that help them with social and emotional skills and computational thinking and literacy. The money to develop that kind of content has gone away. That’s what I’m worried about.”

This story was reported by Adam Reilly and edited by Senior Assignment Editor Matt Baskin and Senior Politics Editor Azita Ghahramani.