NPR to Fire 10% of Staff After $30M Budget Gap, Largest Layoff Since 2008 

Taxpayer-funded NPR will lay off ten percent of its workforce, going from approximately 1,200 to about 1,050 employees, after the left-wing media company failed to generate enough revenue, the organization announced Thursday.

NPR, whose budget is subsidized nearly 11 percent by taxpayer funds, announced a staggering $30 million budget shortfall. The gap will impact ten percent of the media company’s employees and force the organization to cut four podcasts. The network vowed most cut employees would stay on until April 28.

The massive layoffs represent the largest reduction in staff since the 2008 recession.

“We literally are fighting to secure the future of NPR at this very moment by restructuring our cost structure. It’s that important,” NPR chief executive John Lansing said. “It’s existential.”

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The layoff will affect the production staff of shows and podcasts, website designers, and research teams, among others. In addition, the taxpayer-funded network will cancel some of its left-leaning podcasts, such as Invisibilia, Louder Than a Riot, Rough Translation, and Everyone & Their Mom.

“We’ve tried very hard to sustain the essential things that will keep us moving forward,” said Anya Grundmann, NPR’s senior vice president of programming and audience development. “That includes our ability to be meaningful to audiences on digital and visual platforms, our radio audiences, our podcast audiences — our narrative journalism.”

Many NPR affiliates have a history of attacking conservatives and Republican lawmakers. Just this month, Republican House Conference Chair Elise Stefanik (R-NY) was targeted by a taxpayer-funded NPR affiliate in New York State.

“Taxpayer-funded disinformation outlet NCPR, caught unlawfully sending emails supporting Democrat candidates, continues their strange, sexist obsession with lying about Elise Stefanik,” a senior adviser to Stefanik, Alex DeGrasse, told Breitbart News.

In 2021, NPR published false claims in a book review of Hunter Biden’s memoir that his laptop was Russian disinformation. It has since issued a correction, referencing the now-debunked Politico story on October 19, 2020, which used “dozens of former intel officials” to push a false and misleading narrative about the origins of Hunter’s laptop.