Home DOGE Committee Is Setting Its Sights on NPR and PBS

• It is beginning to develop into clear how Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene plans to make use of the DOGE subcommittee.
• She’s asking the CEOs of PBS and NPR to testify in a listening to in March.
• Greene says she needs the organizations to justify why they obtain public funds.

The Home DOGE subcommittee has discovered its first targets: NPR and PBS.

In letters despatched to each media organizations on Monday, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the chairwoman of the Home Oversight Subcommittee on Delivering on Authorities Effectivity, requested that their CEOs testify in a listening to on March 3 or 24.

Within the letters, the Georgia congresswoman accused each NPR and PBS of manufacturing “systemically biased” content material, pointing to NPR’s dealing with of the Hunter Biden laptop computer story and PBS’s reporting on a gesture that Elon Musk made at an Inauguration Day occasion.

“As a company that receives federal funds by its member stations, PBS ought to present reporting that serves your entire public, not only a slender slice of like-minded people and ideological curiosity teams,” Greene wrote.

In an announcement on Monday, NPR stated that the group would “welcome the chance to debate the crucial function of public media in delivering neutral, fact-based information and reporting to the American public.”

A spokesperson for PBS additionally stated they “admire the chance to current to the committee how now, greater than ever, the service PBS supplies issues for our nation.”

NPR says it receives lower than 1% of its annual price range from the federal authorities on common. PBS, in the meantime, says it will get 15% of its income from the federal government.

Individually, the chair of the Federal Communications Fee, Brendan Carr, launched an investigation into NPR and PBS over sponsorships.

The DOGE subcommittee, whereas meant to pursue comparable targets to Musk’s DOGE staff within the govt department, is a separate entity — and it is prone to be a discussion board for televised clashes between Democrats and Republicans over the federal authorities.

Afterward Monday, Rep. Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico — Greene’s Democratic counterpart on the subcommittee — sharply criticized the letter in an announcement to BI.

“Whereas funding for public media has lengthy been a goal of GOP leaders, we have now by no means seen such blatant assaults on the media and establishments as we have seen the final two weeks, together with this effort to intimidate and undermine public media as with this DOGE listening to known as by our colleagues,” Stansbury stated.