Rural PBS broadcast tower
Credit: Shutterstock
Of all the cuts proposed in President Trump’s new budget, the proposal to eliminate federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is perhaps most poorly understood.
Because the CPB is an umbrella agency involved with PBS and NPR, any time the government considers cuts to the agency, it’s usually interpreted as the government defunding Sesame Street (which airs in first run on HBO now, before being rerun on PBS) or some other PBS Kids production. But the majority of PBS programming is produced by outside entities — member stations, another country’s broadcasters, or independent production companies (like Sesame Workshop) — and those outside entities usually secure their funding via means other than the government.
It’s true that just over 23 percent of the CPB’s budget (nearly entirely derived from the federal government) goes toward the development and acquisition of television and radio programming. And, yes, losing that stipend will hurt PBS and NPR on some level — though the difference will probably be […]
Rural immigrant physicians in the operating room.
Immigrant doctors from the six Muslim-majority countries included in President Trump’s revised travel ban play a critical role in caring for Americans, especially in many of the Rust Belt and rural areas that voted heavily for the Republican, according to an analysis by graduate students in economics at Harvard University and MIT.
The economists found that these doctors, who handle about 14 million patient visits a year, are unevenly distributed across the country, often settling in areas where American doctors are reluctant to work.
The researchers — who are pursuing doctorates in economics or have recently earned that degree — found the US physician workforce includes more than 7,000 doctors who attended medical school in Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Those are the six countries whose citizens are banned from entering the United States unless they already have a visa or green card, under Trump’s new order. But the travel ban will not immediately affect doctors already working here.
“There’s a […]
President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-South Carolina), at a conformation hearing, in Washington, January 24, 2017. The budget office has drafted a hit list of programs that Trump could eliminate to trim domestic spending, including long-standing conservative targets like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Legal Services Corporation, AmeriCorps and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities.
Credit: Stephen Crowley / The New York Times
Despite the National Endowment for the Arts’ vital role in the US economy, in February, Trump announced that his proposed 2018 budget would eliminate the agency.
While the NEA has been on the target list for the right wing for ages, with so much else at stake, it’s hard to imagine that the left wing will take this on as a priority in its resistance efforts.
The final budget proposal is promised to be out within weeks, which leads us to ask, what would life be like without the NEA?
Fifty years ago, Congress voted to authorize […]
California Governor Jerry Brown. Credit: California Air Resources Board/ Flickr
Michael Picker stood in the freezing cold outside of the Environmental Protection Agency early Thursday morning passing out fliers that read, “Come work for California. Fight climate change.”
Picker was far away from his home in Sacramento, where he is the president of California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), for meetings with the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners. He decided to try to recruit demoralized EPA staffers, who are facing deep program cuts and controversial new leadership. The EPA’s new administrator, Scott Pruitt, has a long record of opposing the agency’s work.
Picker hopes to entice them to work for a state government with one of the most ambitious climate goals in the country. California is looking to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The fliers pointed people to a webpage to sign up for more details.
Picker’s timing was good: The White House had just unveiled cuts of 31 percent to the agency’s budget, the smallest proposed […]
