Amid significant federal funding cuts to public media, Twin Cities PBS station TPT is laying off approximately 25 employees across multiple departments.

The station faces a 10 percent budget cut due to recent Congressional action defunding the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, TPT President and CEO Sylvia Strobel said Friday on the station’s news program “Almanac.” Four days later, the station announced layoffs in a staff email.

In an unusual move spurred by a Trump Administration request, Congress last week rescinded $1.1 billion in already-approved funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 2026 and 2027. That effectively fully defunded the organization that directs federal dollars to National Public Radio, PBS and some 1,500 local public radio and TV stations around the country, including TPT and Minnesota Public Radio.

The precise extent of the eliminated positions at TPT is unclear, but layoffs appear to affect staff in marketing, development and national programming including the TPT-based online publication Next Avenue, according to an affected employee. The station also was hurt by the recent termination of certain U.S. Department of Education grants for children’s programming, Strobel said on “Almanac.”

Strobel and other TPT leaders did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday. A TPT spokesperson also declined an interview in May regarding the station’s financial status but said leaders were “closely monitoring current threats to federal funding.”

“We hoped for a different outcome, but these actions were necessary to ensure our resiliency through an uncertain economic landscape,” Strobel wrote in a Tuesday email to staff announcing the layoffs, effective Wednesday. “We are sad to see our colleagues go and wish them well as they leave TPT.”

Bill Hanley, a former TPT executive vice president who founded the “Almanac” current affairs hour 41 years ago, said there’s no indication the locally-driven news show has been affected by the latest cuts, which have landed harder on national programming.

Hanley said he remains in touch with former Almanac employees and others in the industry. “It let go some really good videographers over the past couple of years, but Almanac is fine,” he said. “Everybody is really cautious about saying much.”

Hanley said cuts could force even deeper changes at public TV stations that have lost as much as a third of their budget, including Lakeland Public Television in Bemidji, PBS North in Duluth, Pioneer PBS in Granite Falls and KSMQ in Austin, Minn.

“I would be stunned if we don’t see conversations about the consolidation of some of these stations, if Duluth doesn’t absorb Bemidji, or some other absorption,” Hanley said. “It would be irresponsible for boards not to talk about it.”

Locally, leaders of other media organizations like MPR, Jazz88 and community radio station KFAI also have said that defunding the CPB will severely hamper their ability to continue programming as normal.

The CPB, a private nonprofit, was created by bipartisan Congressional approval in the 1960s. Trump administration officials tie the current funding cuts — which passed in both the Senate and House of Representatives on slim party-line margins — to an alleged left-leaning political bias within public media programming, though these concerns have not been well-substantiated by policymakers, per Associated Press reporting.

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