PBS has hired Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with deep ties to the Trump administration, amid Republican threats to scrap federal funding for the public news outlet.
Ballard Partners will lobby for PBS on “advocacy related to funding,” according to lobbying disclosures filed with Congress on Tuesday. Brian Ballard, the firm’s founder, is registered as one of the lobbyists on the account.
The hiring comes as Republicans have called to defund PBS and NPR over what they say are the outlets’ anti-conservative bias. “You all can hate us on your own dime,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R., Ga.), the chairwoman of the House Subcommittee on DOGE, told PBS and NPR executives at a House hearing last week.
PBS is the latest organization in Republicans’ crosshairs to turn to Ballard Partners, whose former partners include White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Attorney General Pam Bondi. Harvard University hired the Florida-based firm earlier this year amid concerns that the Trump administration would cut its funding over its failure to stop anti-Semitism on campus. Despite having Ballard in its corner, the White House this week announced a review of $9 billion in grants to Harvard.
The University of Michigan, another Ballard client under pressure from the administration, has so far avoided sanctions. The Big Ten school ended its diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives last week, citing threats from the Department of Education to end federal funding for schools that maintain the controversial programs.
PBS will likely face an uphill battle to preserve its federal funding. Trump said Tuesday that Republicans “MUST DEFUND AND TOTALLY DISASSOCIATE THEMSELVES FROM NPR & PBS,” calling the news organizations “RADICAL LEFT ‘MONSTERS’” that have “SO BADLY HURT OUR COUNTRY!”
That would prove a major blow to PBS, which relies more heavily on federal funding for its operations than does NPR. According to the New York Times, federal funds made up 15 percent of PBS’s $373 million budget last year.
PBS and Ballard Partners did not respond to requests for comment.
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