Project 2025 and the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation have a plan for a future Republican administration to defund “woke” public media institutions, including PBS and NPR.

Last year, Project 2025, a comprehensive transition plan organized by the Heritage Foundation, released a nearly 900-page policy book titled Mandate for Leadership: A Conservative Promise. The book outlines a radical set of policy proposals that would dismantle the civil service, outlaw abortion, and roll back civil rights. (The effort is backed by over 100 conservative partner organizations and has tied itself to former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.)

One chapter, written by Heritage Foundation senior fellow Mike Gonzalez, lays out a plan for how a Republican administration might defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which uses taxpayer dollars to help fund public media institutions like PBS and NPR.

In his chapter on public broadcasting, Gonzalez claimed “all Republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake” and “the next conservative President must” defund public media “and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary.”

In one passage, Gonzalez argued that “the government should not be compelling the conservative half of the country to pay for the suppression of its own views.” He claimed:

The chapter then outlines how a Republican president could defund public media by refusing to sign any spending bill that earmarks “a penny for the CPB”:

Gonzalez also supported his argument by citing a Pew Research study that showed the PBS viewers identify as “mostly liberal.”

“That may be an acceptable business model for MSNBC or CNN, but not for a taxpayer-subsidized broadcaster,” he wrote.

Gonzalez and the Heritage Foundation have advocated for defunding public media for years — and those attacks have only increased

The Project 2025 policy book wasn’t the first time Gonzalez railed against public media. Gonzalez has been calling on Congress to defund public media since at least 2017. Those attacks have become more frequent in recent months.

In various op-eds, which later published on the Heritage Foundation’s website, Gonzalez has argued for defunding public media, which he has claimed only serve to amplify “the woke mindset of bi-coastal elites.”

In an April 23 column titled “The Next GOP President Should Defund Woke Public Broadcasting,” Gonzalez wrote that “it is difficult to see” how taxpayer funding for public broadcasting “survives” if Republicans win the House, Senate, and White House in a future election.

“Many of us have long known that there was a serious problem with a taxpayer-funded programming system that ignored half the country,” he wrote. “They thought they could take money from everyone, but only reflect, and respect, the thinking of a woke minority.”

Gonzalez also characterized NPR’s new CEO, Katherine Maher, as “the poster child of everything wrong with the CPB,” suggesting  that Maher’s “very progressive public statements” — which seemingly include social media posts criticizing former Trump and expressing support for Black Lives Matter — indicated she has a “a very conscious bias toward all things Left.”

When Heritage shared Gonzalez’s article on X, the caption simply stated: “Defund NPR."

In January, Gonzalez made similar arguments in an article titled “Taxpayers Shouldn’t Have To Fund Biased, Woke Public Broadcasting.”

In that article, Gonzalez criticized NPR for “amplifying the woke mindset of bi-coastal elites,” which he characterized as “the ‘alternative facts’ of the parasitic critical Marxist orthodoxy that, for the past three or four decades, has invaded the host of American cultural institutions.”

After a former NPR editor criticized his former employer for cultivating a supposed liberal bias at the organization, Trump himself, whose previous administration proposed slashing public media funding, opined on the matter.

In an all-caps Truth Social post, the GOP presidential candidate wrote: “NO MORE FUNDING FOR NPR, A TOTAL SCAM!