JOHNSTON, Iowa — Friday morning in congress, the House narrowly passed President Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency cuts package. This approves $9 billion in spending cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting. It will now head to the president to be signed into law.

Iowa PBS and Iowa Public Radio have been preparing for these cuts the last few months since it was proposed in early May. Nationally, this package cuts more than $1.1 billion for public broadcasting.

Iowa PBS will lose about $3.5 million in the next couple months. This is the largest cut for the station in 55 years. The funding from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting makes up about 18% of its budget.

Iowa PBS broadcasts in all 99 Iowa counties, broadcasting national programing, local specialty shows and new this year: all Iowa high school sports championships.

Iowa PBS Executive Director and GM Andrew Batt said they’re going to fight to keep all of that. They’re now hoping the community can support them with that missing funding.

“An important aspect for the public to understand is that we’re a noncommercial public television station. We’re actually banned by federal law from traditional advertising and what’s called retransmission fees, which are the top two ways a commercial station actually receives funding through those means. We are banned by federal law from receiving that,” Batt said. “In the past, were funded in part by the federal government. So, the rescission package removes the funding but keeps the regulations in place. We do have a strong membership base, and we’ll be leaning on more support from Iowans in this process that they have supported us for our whole half century of existence, and we’ll need their support now more than ever.”

Right now, Batt said they are going to do their best to keep all staff and programing as it is, but “anything we do will be reexamined to how we can do it.”

The majority of Iowa PBS’ budget is not from federal funding, but it’s still nearly one fifth.

“I’d say, fairly disappointing when you go through this process. There is strong support at every level for what we do locally. This process, we believe, was targeted a little bit more at the national level and national organizations. But this system of public broadcasting is made up of the local stations like ours. The local content we produced from state championships, to the state fair, to tourism programs about the state. Those have wide bipartisan support, but they’re impacted by this. So the disappointing part, I would say, is there is strong support for what we do here locally and the outcome of this will disproportionately affect what we do locally,” Batt said.

Meanwhile, Iowa Public radio is expecting to lose about 10% of its budget, which is around $1 million. They have 26 stations across the state.

Both Iowa PBS and IPR have community programs that will be impacted. Iowa PBS has a whole education department where they work with schools and teachers. They’re, again, hoping to keep that going but need the community’s help to fund it all.

Iowa News: