Introduction

May it outlive us.

—Mark Hood, WFHB Quarterly Meeting, December 14, 2024

The circumstances and stakes of community radio in the United States have changed dramatically during the period in which I have conducted my dissertation research. When I began my fieldwork, most of my radio colleagues at Bloomington, Indiana-based community station WFHB agreed that the station was in excellent shape. It had money in reserve, eight paid staff members, and a constant flow of new volunteers, making the organization by many metrics the biggest it had ever been.

This ideal scenario changed quickly. 2024 saw the election of Donald Trump to a non-consecutive second term as president of the United States along with generally favorable outcomes for the right-wing Republican Party (GOP) across the country, giving them control of the U.S. Congress. Within six months, the national decades-long animosity between the political right and non-profit media reached a kind of head with a post to the sitting president’s accounts on both X and Trump Media and Technology Group-owned platform Truth Social: “REPUBLICANS MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM NPR & PBS, THE RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!”[1][2] On April 15, 2025, news broke that Trump and his administration were drafting a memorandum requesting that Congress not only cut future federal funding to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), but rescind already approved funding for the next fiscal year beginning in October 2025.

While the CPB had long been a target of GOP threats, these were more tangibly worrisome than anything in the corporation’s 58-year history. In the 87 days between the start of Trump’s second term and the news on April 15, the Trump administration easily broke Franklin D. Roosevelt’s standing record for number of executive orders signed. Citing “efficiency” as a driving force, these executive orders moved in lockstep with what the Heritage Foundation conservative thinktank had set forth as their goals in the 900 or so pages of a policy manifesto titled Project 2025, despite Trump’s pre-inaugural denials of his involvement with it. A TIME magazine article by Nik Popli (2025) enumerated the key topics covered in Project 2025 as immigration and border security, environment and energy policy, government reform and bureaucratic restructuring, cultural issues, and foreign relations.

Driven by apparent values of small government, isolationism, and nationalism, the recommendations in Project 2025 and the policies and orders enacted in Trump’s first three months of the presidential term moved swiftly. The immediate effects were severe. Foreign-born residents’ visas were revoked without warning, leading to multiple accounts of detention, deportation, and even extranational imprisonment without due process. As Kimmy Yam (2025) reported for NBC, attorneys specializing in these residents’ cases observed that “people who have protested in support of Palestinians, those with previous arrests, and those with certain social media posts are the likeliest to have been swept up.” The wrongful (as admitted by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran national with a wife and three children in the U.S., to El Salvador and the insistence of Trump and Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele that it was impossible to return him to his home and family, garnered particular media scrutiny (Aleaziz 2025). In an op-ed for the Detroit Free Press, former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade cautioned that “Abrego Garcia is entitled to constitutional protections, including due process, which means notice and an opportunity to be heard before our liberty can be taken from us… if he can be denied that right, then so can any of us” (2025). Her appeal seemed meant to reach U.S. citizens and residents who might think of themselves as more deserving of U.S. residence and due process than Abrego Garcia, Mahmoud Khalil, Badar Khan Suri, Rümeysa Öztürk, Doğukan Günaydin, Rasha Alawieh, Momodou Taal, Alireza Doroudi, Leqaa Kordia, Yunseo Chung, Ranjani Srinivasan, Kseniia Petrova, or the hundreds of other foreign-born residents detained, deported, and/or forced to flee the country with little to no explanation or recourse (Tsui 2025). Even those unmoved by the suffering of others (perhaps, especially, of capital ‘o’ “Others”) might at least have some sense of self-preservation.[3]

While the impact to non-commercial radio was, at least at this point, not comparable to the existential material violence the government was already committing or sanctioning against not only non-citizens but citizens perceived as disruptive to a capitalist/cisheteropatriarchal/white supremacist social order (e.g. Black, brown, trans, intersex, unmarried, pro-choice, disabled…), the president’s fully capitalized declaration of the sphere’s most well-known and powerful players as “radical left ‘monsters’” made clear that publicly funded media, too, were at risk of destruction. An executive order sent out from the presidential administration on May 1, entitled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization of Biased Media,” doubled down on the threat. The president did not have the power to make the cuts directly, but this order along with continued social media posts made clear that he considered it the duty of any loyal Republican legislator to support this.

On July 18, 2025, the U.S. Congress passed the Rescissions Act of 2025 and presented it to the president, who signed it into law on July 24. As per his request, it “clawed back” nine billion dollars promised to the CPB, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and other agencies focused on “international peacekeeping, global health, refugee assistance, democracy promotion, disaster relief, and public broadcasting” (Greenberg 2025). For WFHB, this meant the sudden loss of 25% of the station’s funding. Our reserves could not sustain us as we were. We would have to make swift cuts to survive, a heavy blow given the growth I had witnessed at the station during my first 13 years as a volunteer.

[1] Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump). “REPUBLICANS MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM NPR & PBS, THE RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!” X, April 1, 2025, https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1907174400144589035.

[2] Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump). “REPUBLICANS MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM NPR & PBS, THE RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’ THAT SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!” Truth Social, April 1, 2025, https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/114264549657133828.

[3] I initially wrote this section in the summer of 2025. Less than a year later, countless more people have suffered and, in some cases, died at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, some of them U.S.-born citizens engaging in nonviolent protest behavior.