Can NPR do without federal funding? Its CEO says she’s optimistic.

Maher, who took the post in March 2024, said the network can weather this moment of crisis.

“Although the loss of federal funding is devastating for many people, certainly in terms of longer term impacts on universal access across the nation,” she said in an interview, “NPR itself is positioned to have runway to withstand operational changes and business model evolution.”

The cuts came swiftly this summer. On July 18, Congress passed Trump’s rescissions package on party lines and stripped $1.1 billion from NPR, PBS, and member stations — all the money appropriated for the next two fiscal years. Two weeks later, on July 31, the Senate introduced a draft appropriations bill that would zero out future funding. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which not only distributes federal funds but also finances broadcast infrastructure, conducts station audits, compiles audience data and negotiates music rights, said the next day it is shutting down at the end of the year.

NPR is perhaps better positioned for a new era without federal funding than PBS, which relies on taxpayers for about 15 percent of its annual budget. By contrast, NPR only gets about 1 percent. But many of its member stations, especially those in rural America, are far more dependent on federal funding, creating a ripple effect that Maher said greatly amplifies the cuts’ impact on the network itself.

Maher, the bright-eyed 42-year-old CEO of NPR joined the public radio giant in March 2024 not from a local member station but rather as an outsider to the system: She was previously the chief executive of the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, which oversees the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. But understanding — and working with those stations — is key to any NPR chief’s mission; and never more so than now.

One third of NPR’s budget comes from member stations licensing its programming, Maher said — name brand shows like “All Things Considered,” “Morning Edition” and “Weekend Edition.” Citing a study from the consultancy Public Media Company, she said 78 of 246 members are in imminent danger of going dark.

Maher said a local station crisis could trickle up to NPR. “It’s not that 78 stations or so will go under and that will be the sum total of the consequences,” Maher said. “We recognize there’s roughly half of our membership that will have to make significant adaptations in response to losing federal funding.” Such changes could mean some stations ditching NPR membership, as one station manager in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, recently told The Washington Post she might have to do.

To stanch the bleeding, NPR is offering $8 million in “fee relief” to the neediest stations — those who relied on federal funding for more than 10 percent of their budgets.

With CPB shutting down, NPR is also working to fill critical infrastructure gaps. Maher said NPR is negotiating with PBS to possibly take over music rights management and distribution services that CPB previously handled. “Whether they’re music stations or news stations, everybody uses music as a way of storytelling or through transitions within news,” she said. “Music rights are such a key piece of how they provide that service.”

Turning around the public radio ecosystem isn’t Maher’s task alone, even if she is the face of the biggest player in the game. Station leaders across the country have made public pleas with listeners to support their stations with donations and pitched to local foundations, philanthropies and wealthy individuals.

She said public media found itself benefiting from “rage giving” — the phenomenon where advocacy organizations see donation surges when their missions are threatened, citing the ACLU and Planned Parenthood as examples. ” We have finally found ourselves in that space because something was taken away from us that traditionally had been so supported with bipartisan support and that has served 99 percent of America.”

“Many of the sisters in our congregation are consumers of the excellent programming provided by NEPM,” the nuns wrote in a letter. “We are very concerned about the federal government slashing of funding for public media and see this as a shortsighted action that hurts many Americans to benefit the few.”

Despite the financial crisis, several station leaders noted unprecedented coordination and collaboration emerging from the ordeal.

Mountain prefers “bottom-up” solutions rather than bigger roles for national organizations like NPR or PBS. “Our local public media organizations are the closest to community members and to community-centered solutions for the future,” she said. “We don’t need a middleman.”

Whether the current outpouring of community support can sustain a system built on the promise of universal access remains uncertain. “The whole point was that this was guaranteed public media for every single American,” Young said in Louisville. “When you start to chip away at that … it’s hard to see a silver lining because that is the fundamental mission.”

As she addresses the new financial situation, Maher rejects the long-standing criticisms of bias at NPR that fueled it.

NPR is not “partisan,” she said, and has no “affinity for one party or one perspective over the other,” characterizing the organization as ideological only in that it supports “democracy and the Constitution and the role of the press and the right of every citizen to seek and receive information.” And in terms of aptly representing the “cultural conversations” across the country, she said, “There’s always work for us to do there.”

“I also recognize that a sort of double-edged sword of all of this in terms of the criticism and accusations around federal funding requiring us to walk a line that may not even exist around perfect representation of the nation,” Maher said. “In all truthfulness, I think to ask any news or media organization to comprehensively serve all 330 million citizens of this nation, to feel as though we’ve got it right every single time is also an unrealistic request.”

Maher sees opportunity to emerge from this crisis stronger than before. Stations are already “working in a more coordinated and strategic fashion than they’ve had to in the past,” she said, echoing member station leaders.

“Times of crisis are opportunities as well,” she said.