It was a question so simple that a child could answer, posed by Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., to Mike Gonzalez, a Heritage Foundation senior fellow. “What does ‘ugga mugga’ mean to you?” Khanna asked.
“Nothing,” Gonzalez replied.
Fair enough. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything to you, either. If you didn’t know this exchange took place in the middle of a House Subcommittee on Delivering Government Efficiency hearing, you might wonder why it matters that Gonzalez was clueless about this or any other aspect of “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.”
Khanna was asking about things any of the millions of parents with children who watch one of the Public Broadcasting Service’s most popular children’s programs would know.
“Is Elmo now, or has he ever been, a member of the Communist Party of the United States? Yes or no?”
But Gonzalez, who was brought before the DOGE subcommittee to advocate for defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding for National Public Radio and PBS, hadn’t a clue. He didn’t know that “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” is not affiliated with “Sesame Street.” He couldn’t even tell Khanna the name of the iconic public television show from which it was spun off. That would be “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
As for the meaning of “ugga mugga,” we’ll let Daniel Tiger explain it.
Wednesday’s two-hour and 26-minute hearing was punctuated by many infuriating, embarrassing and downright ignorant lines of questioning, the bulk of which was directed toward NPR president and CEO Katherine Maher and PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger.
But Khanna’s bit was not without purpose, nor was it the most theatrical. His fellow Democrats called attention to the ridiculousness of the hearing, including Khanna’s fellow California Rep., Robert Garcia, who used his time to ask Kerger, among other things he purported that the American people want to know, “Is Elmo now, or has he ever been, a member of the Communist Party of the United States? Yes or no?”
“No,” the PBS head responded dryly.
“Now, are you sure, Ms. Kerger?” Garcia continued, gesturing toward a large picture of Larry David’s nemesis. “He’s obviously red.”
For a moment, she played along, “Well, he is a puppet,” she said, “but no.”
(L-R) President/CEO of National Public Radio (NPR) Katherine Maher and President/CEO of Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Paula Kerger testify during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on March 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. (DREW ANGERER/AFP via Getty Images)Committee member Greg Casar, D-Texas, piled onto this bit, peppering Gonzalez with questions like, “To your knowledge, has Miss Piggy ever been caught trying to funnel billions of dollars in government contracts to herself and to her companies? The answer is no. How about Arthur the Aardvark? Has he ever fired independent government watchdogs who are investigating his companies? The answer is no.”
This was meant to call attention to the shamefulness of this hearing, “if shame was still a thing,” as the committee’s ranking member Stephen Lynch, D-Mass. put it. A beat or two after his set-up, Casar mentioned that it’s DOGE’s leader Elon Musk, not the Muppets, rewarding himself with billions in government contracts – potentially $11.8 billion over the next few years, according to The Washington Post’s analysis. He’s also previously called for NPR and PBS to be defunded, apropos of nothing.
In asking Gonzalez about “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood,” though, Khanna’s aim was more pointed: He was showing that the people who are most insistent on cutting public broadcasting funding don’t watch or listen to much of it, if any at all.
Gonzalez, who wrote the blueprint for defunding the CPB for Project 2025, derides the content that NPR and PBS present – lineups that include public television’s massive historical docuseries by Ken Burns, “NOVA” science documentaries and “Nature” features — as “noneducational.”
But it’s been quite some time since the absence of knowledge about public media or input from the people it serves has stopped right-wing figures from forming policy-shaping opinions.
In any case, the Democrats’ showmanship, such as it was, fit well enough within a hearing that subcommittee chair Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., subtly titled “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the heads of NPR and PBS Accountable.”
Republicans wanted PBS and NPR to answer for, among other alleged sins, inadequately covering their fixation on Hunter Biden’s laptop; NPR’s unflattering coverage of Trump when he was a candidate; left-wing bias enumerated in an opinion piece by former senior business editor Uri Berliner, who resigned from NPR last year; and Maher’s incendiary tweets calling Donald Trump “a deranged racist sociopath” from 2020, when she ran the Wikimedia Foundation. (She apologized profusely for exercising that First Amendment right during the hearing.)
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Once she and Kerger were called to testify before what Axios described as “[t]he most chaotic new committee in Congress,” it was a foregone conclusion that Wednesday’s hearing was not going to land in the win column for PBS or NPR.
Maher has been in her position for a year. Kerger, on the other hand, is PBS’ longest-serving president, having taken up her watch in 2006. Both she and I have been doing our respective jobs long enough to have witnessed previous right-leaning Congresses target public media.
But this battle feels different. In the short time since Donald Trump began his second presidential term, GOP officials have signed on to unpopular and damaging policies despite the harm they might inflict on their constituents.
The ideologues shaping this discussion seemed more concerned with producing potentially viral exchanges to gin up outrage on social media and support Fox News talking points.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, has ordered an investigation into PBS and NPR regarding whether member stations violated government rules by identifying their programming underwriters on the air.
Meanwhile, the ideologues shaping this discussion seemed more concerned with producing potentially viral exchanges to gin up outrage on social media and support Fox News talking points.
The situation isn’t entirely hopeless. On Wednesday, Pew Research released a report indicating 43% of its poll respondents – Democrats, Republicans and Independents — believe NPR and PBS should continue to receive funding from the federal government. It consistently ranks as one of the most trusted news sources and American institutions, according to YouGov.
Saving PBS and NPR in the past required viewers of all political stripes to come together and pressure their representatives to support it. If their bipartisan boosters rally to save it this time, it isn’t guaranteed that Congress will follow their wishes.
According to its own report, NPR receives around 36% of its $300 million annual operating budget from corporate underwriting spots and 30% from station programming fees (about 30%). About 1% comes directly from federal sources, it says, while PBS receives roughly 16% of its funds from the CPB.
Kerger was a good sport in playing along with Democratic subcommittee members’ Muppet jokes. Nevertheless, you could tell from the serious expression on her face that these proceedings were nothing to laugh about.
PBS has always been and will always be a soft target in the culture wars, demonstrated by Greene opening the hearing by describing NPR and PBS as “radical left-wing echo chambers for a narrow audience of mostly wealthy white urban liberals and progressives who generally look down on and judge rural America.”
Chairman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. speaks as Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass. looks on during the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)That was the warm-up. One of her aides produced a giant, fabulous picture of drag performer and author Lil Miss Hot Mess, who Greene described as a “child predator” and “monster.” The queen’s crime? Reading to children in an April 2021 segment for “Let’s Learn,” an educational show produced by the WNET group and the New York City Department of Education.
A YouTube video that has since been set to private opens with a statement dated May 24, 2021, clarifying that the series was not funded or distributed by PBS. Kerger repeated this, further adding that New York’s member station mistakenly placed it on the PBS website, but it was neither intended for national distribution nor aired on PBS itself.
In a statement shared with Salon and posted to social media, Lil Miss Hot Mess responded that she wasn’t surprised that Greene called her hateful names. “But the unfortunate irony of Greene’s political bullying is that while she claims to promote liberty, in reality, she just wants to tell us all what to think and do,” the performer said.
“Greene’s attempts to defund PBS and NPR are the worst form of censorship,” she continued, “reflecting both her own ignorance and the Republican party’s authoritarian impulses.”
In her opener, Greene also cited a 2015 “Frontline” documentary that followed transgender kids and their families, making the vile suggestion of it being evidence of public television allegedly “sexualizing and grooming children.”
Ah, yes. Young children are secretly wild about “Frontline” and “Independent Lens,” another long-running series featuring independently produced films that also caught some flak during the hearing.
Anyway, both shows air in primetime, amply removed from PBS’ children’s programming block. “Independent Lens” typically runs at 10 p.m., long after the typical toddler’s bedtime.
Some committee questions didn’t change much from what past officials have asked. Republican members questioned whether Americans still need PBS at a time when many people get their news and information from the oh-so-reliable Internet and podcasts. They also questioned the utility of its award-winning children’s programming since cable channels like Disney and National Geographic have children’s, nature and science shows covered.
As in the past, Kerger and Maher explained the obvious: PBS and NPR are free, reach 99% of the country and are primarily supported by private underwriting and listener donations. Yet again, the public TV and radio heads had to explain how the Corporation for Public Broadcasting works and how much (or little) federal funding is allocated to public media.
The CPB is not a government organization but a private, nonprofit corporation created by Congress in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. Its mission statement reads, in part, “CPB does not produce programming and does not own, operate or control any public broadcasting stations. Additionally, CPB, PBS, and NPR are independent of each other and of local public television and radio stations.”
The entire display was a sham. But not a complete waste.
This is to ensure NPR’s and PBS’s editorial independence from CPB. Contrary to the way several GOP subcommittee members erroneously characterized NPR and PBS, they are not “state media.”
These and other claims resulted in the hearing resembling a light version of a Maoist struggle session. Ironic, since it was Greene and other Trump-aligned representatives muttering asides like, “Sounds like communism,” as they listed the supposed evils of NPR and PBS.
Putting aside the emptiness of GOP committee members’ concern over youngsters being more harmed by anything on PBS than the vast frontier of the notoriously family-friendly Internet, the entire display was a sham. But not a complete waste.
The hearing’s fourth witness, president and chief executive of Alaska Public Media Ed Ulman, testified that public media is essential to rural communities, “especially in remote and rural places where broadcast cannot succeed,” he said. “We provide potentially life-saving warnings and alerts that are crucial for Alaskans who face threats ranging from extreme weather to earthquakes, landslides and even volcanoes.”
The lion’s share of the CPB funding Republicans are eager to cut funnels directly to more than 1500 public media stations to support their programming, including local news. The most significant beneficiaries are rural stations.
“Reducing or eliminating federal funding would be devastating and could cause the closure of many stations, especially the most rural and remote,” Ulman told the committee, making it clear that calls to defund the CPB aren’t merely attacking mainstream journalism. They threaten services that benefit the underprivileged and vulnerable.
As directed by the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, 6% of funds appropriation goes toward system support, defined as “projects and activities that will enhance public broadcasting.” This includes fostering collaboration across the system “to help ensure effective and efficient programs and services” and helping to offset infrastructure costs.
As for the rest, CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison said in a recent press statement, “For every public dollar provided, stations raise nearly seven dollars from donors, underscoring their value to the communities they serve.”
There’s good news about the status of the CPB’s funding — for the time being, anyway. On March 14, Congress approved a Continuing Resolution for Fiscal Year 2025 that President Donald Trump signed into law, which includes $535 million for the organization. Since the CPB is forward-funded by two years, the current allocation is set through 2027.
Of course, DOGE’s directive is to eliminate “wasteful” spending. That $535 million represents less than 1/100th of a percent out of the total federal budget, a recent report on PBS NewsHour cites. Breaking that down further, each American pays $1.50 a year to support the CPB, NPR and PBS. Compared to monthly costs for cable and streaming services, that’s a bargain.
“There’s nothing more American than PBS,” Kerger said, and the millions of people who watch the service’s programming would likely agree with her, even if they don’t agree with everything PBS airs. Supposedly, that is also American. Yet to be seen is whether Congress will continue to honor that principle when the Corporation for Public Broadcasting submits its next appropriations request.
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