91.3 WYSO disc jockey Evan Miller at work. (News archive photo by Reilly Dixon)
WYSO loses federal funding, maintains resolve
- Published: August 13, 2025
Last week, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — a decades-old nonprofit that helps pay for PBS, NPR and 1,500 public radio and television stations across the country — announced it would take steps toward its closure after being defunded by Congress.
For Yellow Springs-based NPR affiliate station 91.3 WYSO, that means the loss of $300,000 in planned operating funds for the coming fiscal year and beyond — a little under 10% of the local station’s budget, which for 2026 is $3.4 million.
As the CPB also brokered music licensing agreements for WYSO and other public radio stations, the nonprofit’s dismantling makes for an uncertain musical future for the local station.
Despite all these existential threats to public media and WYSO losing its federal funding, station General Manager Luke Dennis told the News in an interview last week that the Yellow Springs station’s radio waves will continue sounding out.
“We’re not going to be deterred from our mission,” Dennis said. “We’re going to keep reporting and playing music by any means necessary. We’re not going to be pushed around by wealth or power.”
The loss of the CPB
The CPB came under fire last month when President Donald Trump signed a bill on July 24 that canceled about $1.1 billion that had been previously approved for public broadcasting.
The bill was a federal rescissions package, coupled with the release of the Senate Appropriations Committee’s $9 billion Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies, or “Labor-H,” appropriations bill for fiscal year 2026, which excluded funding for the CPB for the first time in half a century.
The private, nonprofit corporation was authorized by Congress in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, under the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, which sought to create more robust public and independent telecommunications infrastructure afforded “maximum protection from extraneous interference and control.”
In the decades since its founding, the CPB became the country’s largest steward of the federal government’s investment in public broadcasting, as well as the biggest conduit of funding for American public radio and television.
The CPB has ties to popular programming such as NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition,” as well as PBS’s “Sesame Street,” “Mister Roger’s Neighborhood” and Ken Burns’ historical and cultural documentaries.
President Trump claimed in an executive order, ahead of the Labor-H bill, that the country’s public media system has become politically biased and a burdensome expense. His order stated that the CPB’s federal funding of NPR and PBS follows an “outdated and unnecessary” media model — one that is “corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence” and runs counter to “fair, accurate, unbiased and nonpartisan news coverage.”
About a week after Trump signed the executive order to defund the CPB, leaders of the corporation announced that it will begin “an orderly wind-down of its operations.”
“Despite the extraordinary efforts of millions of Americans who called, wrote and petitioned Congress to preserve federal funding for CPB, we now face the difficult reality of closing our operations,” CPB President and CEO Patricia Harrison wrote in a press release issued Aug. 1.
“CPB remains committed to fulfilling its fiduciary responsibilities and supporting our partners through this transition with transparency and care,” Harrison wrote.
WYSO Manager Dennis said that while he believes the Yellow Springs station will remain solvent without the federal funding from the CPB, he fears for the future of smaller NPR stations in more rural parts of the country, which he said are often more dependent on those funds.
“There’s a lot of sadness and doom and gloom for them,” Dennis said. “I think we’ll see a lot of them closing their doors soon.”
As NPR reported last week, some stations have already begun laying off staff and cutting back programming; Pittsburgh-based WQED announced plans to lay off 35% of its staffers, for instance.
“But here in Yellow Springs, we have an answer,” Dennis said. “We have to increase our listener support, and nurture and invest in our local relationships. We plan to put a lot of pressure on membership and seek out more private grants — not federal — and do more special events and fundraisers.”
Those efforts have already proven successful.
Near the end of July, WYSO held a one-day fundraising drive that garnered over 240 individual donations, totalling $71,000 — the largest amount the station ever raised in a single day since its founding in 1958 on the campus of Antioch College.
According to Dennis, week-long fundraising drives typically net approximately $15,000 for the station.
“The success of that drive is evidence to us that people understand the urgency,” Dennis said. “But we’re not out of the woods yet. We want to get one in five listeners donating.”
Dennis added that, while he welcomes generous donations to sustain WYSO’s news and music programming — as well as the station’s physical operations and 21 full-time employees — he said he’d prefer thousands of $5 donations from working-class listeners, rather than a few million-dollar donations.
“It’s time for people to show up and become WYSO members,” Dennis said. “Having a big headcount is crucial for our business model.”
Imagining the worst case scenario for WYSO in the absence of its federal funds, Dennis said he’d never cut back his staff — instead, he’d make the tough decision of rolling back national programming, such as NPR shows like “Morning Edition,” “Fresh Air,” “All Things Considered” or “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!”
As Dennis previously told the News — specifically in a July interview leading up to the passage of the bill that defunded the CPB — the rescinding of federal funds does not affect the station’s plans to move from its longtime home at Antioch College into the Union Schoolhouse this fall.
Owned and under construction by Iron Table Holdings, LLC — local resident and comedian Dave Chappelle’s development company — the renovated Union Schoolhouse, built in 1872, will provide WYSO improved spaces for broadcasting, reporting, performance and hosting community events.
What about the music?
Earlier this week, the News spoke with Evan Miller, WYSO’s assistant music director and host of “Midday Music” and “The Outside,” who said he and other WYSO disc jockeys are girding for the potential musical fallout from the CPB’s dismantling.
As Miller explained, the CPB was the negotiating body between local radio stations and record companies to broker music licenses and royalty fees. The CPB’s agreements were made on behalf of many, if not all, NPR affiliate stations, and allowed Miller to broadcast his three-hour music show, as well as the brief musical interludes between programming — even the music behind Jerry Kenney’s daily traffic updates.
“This is something we’ve never had to worry about,” Miller told the News. “There’s been this one entity negotiating music licenses and royalties for the entire sphere of public media, and now, all these individual stations are on their own.”
In navigating this uncertain terrain, Miller said that he and WYSO Music Director Juliet Fromholt have been in wall-to-wall phone calls, Zoom meetings and email threads with other radio stations, just “trying to figure it all out,” he said.
“There are just so many questions and unknown timelines right now,” Miller said. “The real costs are tough to get because those numbers are sometimes tied up in [nondisclosure agreements] with licensing organizations. This is not just a real problem for radio stations across the country, but the entirety of the music world.”
He continued: “The worst case scenario — which we try not to think about — is that all our music goes away. Our interviews with bands, archived music on our website and everything else with music just goes away. It would be a complete and total erasure of music, full stop.”
In spite of that grim possibility, Miller remains optimistic.
He said that WYSO aims to press ahead with its plans to add more music shows to its roster of programming, and he added that the station’s volunteer-run programs aren’t going anywhere anytime soon — a boon to WYSO amid any possible financial precarity.
“So, we’re not shelling out money for syndicated shows,” Miller said. “We have a strong local ecosystem and a lot of local music programming. We’re almost completely packed in our music schedule by volunteer hosts — my show is the only one that costs us money.”
Miller also gave a nod to what he called the “scrappiness” of WYSO and its Miami Valley roots — a rusty region once beset by the worst effects of deindustrialization, that has in recent years experienced cultural recovery and revitalization.
“Around here, there have been a lot of times when we’ve had problems, when nobody was coming to help, and we’ve had to figure it out — we’ve had to do this before, and we’ll do it again,” Miller said.
He added: “WYSO was founded before NPR [in 1970], so we were here before federal funding. So, if it goes away, then we’ll just continue to do what we do. With that, and our roots at Antioch College, it’d be a betrayal of who we are and where we’ve come from to cower to bullying.”
To support 91.3 WYSO, or to become a sustaining member, go to http://www.bit.ly/4osDhfy.
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