In February 2016, America's Public Television Stations handed Tom Cole its Champion of Public Broadcasting Award.

The citation was not vague. APTS president Patrick Butler said Cole's "extraordinary leadership" was "instrumental" in getting $445 million in level funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting into the House spending bill — "the first time in five years the House has proposed anything but a zero for public broadcasting."

And Butler singled out one specific thing Cole protected:

"Chairman Cole helped ensure critical funding for the public broadcasting interconnection system that makes it possible for public television to serve everyone, everywhere, every day, for free, including the Native American nations of Oklahoma."

Cole accepted the award and said he looked forward to "helping them continue to serve, inform and edify communities in every city and state across the nation."

Nine years later, he helped shut the whole thing down.

What happened in 2025

In June 2025, the White House sent Congress a package asking it to cancel $9.4 billion it had already approved and promised. The bill became the Rescissions Act of 2025. Buried in it was $1.1 billion for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — two full years of funding for public television and radio stations, money Congress had already voted for and stations had already built budgets around.

By then, Cole was chairman of the entire House Appropriations Committee. The bill had to move through his committee first.

It did, on a party-line vote he joined. Then the full House passed it, 214–212, and passed it again in final form, 216–213. Cole's own office put out a release headlined "Cole Votes in Favor of Rescinding Wasteful Spending." The Appropriations Committee he chairs issued another one celebrating the bill's passage.

Trump signed it on July 24, 2025. Eight days later, on August 1, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it was shutting down.

He was asked about it directly

A week before the committee vote, Deadline's Ted Johnson asked Cole whether his past support for public media had changed. Cole's answer:

"No, but I have an up-and-down vote. So, I mean, there's always going to be things in here that you prefer not be, but they are. And so, again, we are going to look at the package and vote accordingly."

That is a striking thing for the chairman of the Appropriations Committee to say. Cole is not a backbencher stuck with somebody else's bill. He runs the committee that writes the spending bills. He was a cosponsor of this one. "I have an up-and-down vote" describes the position of a person with no power over what's in the package — and that is not Tom Cole's position.

It is also a reversal of what he used to say. Seven years earlier, when Trump's first administration tried to zero out CPB and Cole led the subcommittee that funded it, he told Variety — as Deadline recounted — that he came from "probably the reddest state in the union," and that given "the range of services it provides, the quality of programming and the points of view it expresses," the money paid for itself. He called going after public broadcasting "nickel and dime-ing things" when it came to the deficit.

Then he voted for the nickel-and-diming.

Who actually lost the money

Cole's home-state group Friends of OETA had urged him and the rest of the Oklahoma delegation to oppose the package, calling it "absolutely the wrong policy tool at the wrong time" and warning it would "throw the PBS system into chaos by reneging on commitments already made."

Here's what it cost Oklahoma. More than $6 million in public broadcasting money for the state was at risk, with more than $1 million of that going to Oklahoma's NPR stations: KGOU in Norman, KOSU in Oklahoma City, KWGS in Tulsa, KCCU in Lawton, KUCO in Edmond — and KCNP in Ada, which is owned by the Chickasaw Nation.

Tom Cole is an enrolled member of the Chickasaw Nation. He is the longest-serving Native American in the history of Congress.

The damage was real and it was fast. KOSU executive director Rachel Hubbard told Mvskoke Media the cut landed 23 days into her station's fiscal year: "In terms of cash money, it's specifically $311,000." She estimated the real annual hit closer to $500,000 once you count things CPB used to buy for the whole system, like music licensing. KGOU said it lost about $215,000 — roughly one-seventh of its budget. KGOU general manager Dick Pryor said replacing everything CPB provided, including the satellite links, would run his station more than $295,000 a year.

Those satellite links are not a nice-to-have. Pryor described what they do:

"It's so important for us to be able to maintain service and capability to provide news, information, emergency alerts, severe weather warnings, any kind of emergency notifications from the President... because many of those rural counties, cities, live in news deserts where there isn't really any other source of information."

Rural Oklahoma. Severe weather warnings. That is the audience.

The tribal stations

The part APTS praised Cole for in 2016 — service to the Native American nations — is exactly the part that got hit hardest.

The Associated Press reported that 59 tribal radio stations receive CPB funding, and that Native Public Media expected about three dozen of them to be the first to go dark. Those stations reach more than 1.5 million people.

Loris Taylor, CEO of Native Public Media, has written that for many of those communities the station "may be the only source of locally relevant news, emergency alerts, public safety announcements, language preservation, health information and election coverage."

Francene Blythe-Lewis, CEO of Vision Maker Media, put the numbers plainly: "For Indian Country in general, 80% of the communities are rural, and their only access to national news, native story sharing, community news, whatever it is, is through PBS stations or public radio." Her estimate if the money went away: "a good 90% of those stations will cease to exist."

Hubbard, at KOSU, pointed out that the loss reaches stations far past the ones with an NPR logo: "There are fees associated with satellite systems that a lot of really rural tribal stations and stations that have transmitters in rural areas... depend on."

The bigger pattern

Cole is not the only Republican who cast this vote and then went quiet about who it hit. Michigan's John Moolenaar called defunding public radio a "win for the American people" — while the station in his own district lost 19% of its budget. Ohio's Troy Balderson told business leaders that "Congress decides, not the President, not Elon Musk," and then voted for the same package.

What sets Cole apart is that he had the gavel. He chaired the committee. He had spent years telling anyone who asked that this money was worth keeping, and he had a plaque on the wall saying so.

When the moment came, he described himself as a man with nothing but an up-or-down vote — and the Chickasaw Nation's radio station lost its funding along with everyone else's.

Source

The award citation quoted here is APTS's own February 23, 2016 press release, APTS Presents Champion of Public Broadcasting Award To Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole. Photo via Getty Images, from the Associated Press report on tribal radio stations.