Trump Cuts Funding For Animated Series On PBS Kids. Who Is Affected?

Compared to other developed countries, the U.S. federal government offers little financial support to its animation industry. Last night, president Donald Trump signed an executive order to cut one of the few remaining sources of federal government animation funding: PBS Kids.

The broad order is directed at the taxpayer-backed Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a nonprofit entity created by Congress that doles out funding to public broadcasters in the United States. The broadcasters additionally rely on donors and sponsors, with the money from the CPB making up only a portion of their budgets.

It is not clear whether the order can be implemented legally. “CPB is not a federal executive agency subject to the President’s authority,” Patricia Harrison, the president and chief executive of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, said in a statement today. “Congress directly authorized and funded CPB to be a private nonprofit corporation wholly independent of the federal government.”

PBS president and CEO Paula Kerger also issued a statement this morning:

The President’s blatantly unlawful Executive Order, issued in the middle of the night, threatens our ability to serve the American public with educational programming, as we have for the past 50-plus years. We are currently exploring all options to allow PBS to continue to serve our member stations and all Americans.

The White House claims that PBS is used to “spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as ‘news’” and is “trash that passes as ‘news.’” It has previously asked Congress to rescind $1.1 billion from CPB, which amounts to two years’ worth of funding.

Here are some of the animated series that have received funding from CPB in the last couple years. These amounts don’t represent their total budgets, but rather the money that they have received from CPB:

Animation represents a relatively small part of the money distributed by CPB; our research indicates that it amounts to less than five per cent of the group’s overall spending. Nevertheless the money is an important source of funding for educational animation in the United States.

Paul Siefken, CEO and president of Fred Rogers Productions, which produces animated series like Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and Alma’s Way, told Kidscreen today:

Federal funding for PBS KIDS is irreplaceable and essential for the critical educational resources that tens of millions of children rely on all over the country. We support PBS and have chosen to work with them for the last 57 years because no other children’s media provider has public television’s local infrastructure, which helps our youngest learners where they live and learn.

“The new executive order would directly affect funding that our kids programming relies on,” Seeta Pai, vp of children’s media and education at GBH (Boston’s PBS station which produces a lot of content for PBS Kids), also told Kidscreen.