Trump’s Cuts Are Officially Ending PBS in an Entire State

New Jersey’s only public television station, NJ PBS, is anticipated to shutter in just over nine months thanks to President Trump’s budget cuts.

As first reported by The New Jersey Globe this week, WNET, the company that has operated the station for 14 years since former Republican Governor Chris Christie shut down the state-run New Jersey Network, did not reach an agreement to extend its contract with the state beyond June 30, 2026.

The network relied on about $1.5 million in federal funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, but the Republican-controlled Congress in July passed the Trump administration plan to cut all federal support for PBS and its member stations

Earlier this year, state funding was also cut, from $1 million to $250,000, under a spending plan signed by Democratic Governor Phil Murphy.

“The recent cuts by the federal government and New Jersey state government have been very significant,” NJ PBS said in a statement.

“I believe that the State’s intransigence or maybe even apathy, coupled with federal funding cuts and new media challenges, likely influenced WNET’s decision” not to renew, suggested NJ PBS Chairman Scott Kobler in an op-ed.

New Jersey’s Democratic senators, Cory Booker and Andy Kim, lamented the move, with Booker calling it “a loss for all of us who live here,” and Kim excoriating congressional Republicans for voting “to take money from Elmo and Daniel Tiger and give to billionaires.”

“NJ PBS doesn’t just have kids’ shows and trusted, local news programming, but also critical emergency notification systems that kept residents safe during disasters,” noted Democratic gubernatorial nominee Mikie Sherrill, who promised to “find new ways to fund public media” if elected in November.

“NJ PBS shutting down is more than a station dying,” said Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop, “It’s a warning about who holds power when oversight fades. Without free public media, we lose the lens that keeps those in power honest.”

State Senators John Burzichelli and Andrew Zwicker called for “a top-to-bottom analysis of public television in New Jersey to determine what can and should be done to maintain the type of services the network has provided.”

Months after Elon Musk departed his position at the Department of Government Efficiency, Social Security is suffering extensive damage from the fledgling office’s onslaught of cuts.

Earlier this year, DOGE slashed the Social Security Administration’s workforce by 12 percent, leaving an already understaffed agency in a state of upheaval. The cuts have hit local field offices the hardest, reported The New York Times Wednesday.

Local branches are responsible for serving the 74 million Americans on Social Security, many of whom come to field offices for identity verification when applying for benefits and other in-person assistance. But due to cuts, people who need Social Security cards have had to wait multiple weeks to get an appointment.

And in every office that can’t meet demand, there are frontline workers struggling to manage more responsibilities with fewer resources.

“In my 24 years, I have never seen it so bad to the point that a lot of us are medicated,” said one Social Security technical expert in the Midwest who spoke anonymously to the Times. “We joke about it, because what else can you do?”

In addition to general staff cuts, the agency has shuffled local workers to the national hotline, leaving even fewer employees available for face-to-face communication. And for people seeking help over the phone, the added representatives aren’t making enough of a dent: Many callers still spend hours on hold.

Rebekah Walker, a 41-year-old woman who’s lived with heart abnormalities since childhood, has been fighting to get a payment issue resolved with the agency for three months. She’s had to borrow money for rent and postpone medical help.

“It’s as if I am not a real human being,” Walker told the Times. “I have three children. I’m a single mom.”

Jeffrey Epstein’s self-described “pal” Donald Trump apparently can’t grasp why the pedophile’s crimes are so upsetting for the American public.

Trump complained to aides about the intense public scrutiny of his failure to produce Epstein’s so-called client list, claiming that “Palm Beach in the 90s was a different time,” The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday.

After longtime allies whipped up a furor over the dismal Epstein files rollout on the second day of a Turning Point USA Conference in Tampa, Trump wanted to know, “Why is everyone so fixated on the issue?” the Journal said, asking influential allies, “What would make it die down?”

Trump claimed he cut off contact with Epstein after the financier was convicted for soliciting underage prostitutes, referring to Epstein as a “creep.” But the pair of Manhattan socialites have shared a long and cozy history together.

Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The duo were named and photographed together on several occassions—including at Trump’s second wedding. The socialites were caught shepherding underage girls into casinos together, and Trump reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times. Trump penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the sex trafficker’s 50th birthday, and was quoted in a 2002 New York Magazine profile as saying that he had, at that point, known Epstein for 15 years, referring to him as a “terrific guy.”

Much to Trump’s chagrin, the botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague his administration. Instead of simply disclosing the contents of the files, the Trump administration has expended vast resources to reportedly strip the president’s name from the documents. The White House also tapped Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell to produce a new list of the deceased financier’s associates, which undoubtedly already exists in the Epstein files. The plot granted Maxwell improved living conditions, moving her to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas, and gave her time on the national stage to ask Trump for a pardon.

The Epstein story has remained an anomaly in Trump’s political career. For the better part of a decade, the MAGA leader became adjusted to an undyingly loyal base that rarely skews from or challenges his political vision. But Trump’s proximity to Epstein and his heinous crimes has been an outlier, prompting doubts that have undercut Trump’s influence with large swaths of his followers.

Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House attorney, told the Journal that the federal fiasco surrounding the Epstein scandal was “the worst managed PR event in history.” Its handling was unorganized and chaotic, with the Justice Department and the FBI regularly pointing fingers at one another.

At one point, Attorney General Pam Bondi complained that FBI leadership was “trying to destroy her,” according to the Journal.

President Donald Trump’s administration has upped the stakes of a potential government shutdown by threatening mass firings in federal agencies if the shutdown were to occur.

Whereas usually federal workers would be furloughed in the event of a shutdown and rehired once Congress reopens the government, this order from the White House budget office—first reported Wednesday night by Politico—instructs agencies to permanently eliminate jobs that aren’t consistent with the president’s priorities if the government shuts down.

The Trump administration decision to use the threat of firings as leverage ups the ante in negotiations with congressional Democrats over government funding.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the move an “attempt at intimidation” but didn’t seem swayed by the threat. He said earlier this month, when talking about shutdown negotiations, that the Trump administration’s attacks on federal agencies “will get worse with or without [a shutdown], because Trump is lawless.”

Schumer also believes that the firings likely aren’t as permanent as they seem—that they’ll be overturned in court or that the administration will just end up hiring workers back, as they’re aiming to do with employees fired during DOGE cuts.

“Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government,” Schumer said in a statement.

President Trump was so frustrated by the growing scrutiny around his ties to deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein that he personally tried to kill The Wall Street Journal’s Epstein birthday book story.

The Journal has reported that when Trump first heard about its plans to cover his strange, sultry 50th birthday letter to Epstein, he told aides that it didn’t exist, never happened, and called News Corp chair emeritus Rupert Murdoch personally from Air Force One to get the story pulled. After the story was published anyway, he denied that the letter existed and sued Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher. (The letter was later released.)

Trump’s attempt to kill that story—and the Epstein saga in general—has been a massive failure, rife with miscommunication and missteps that shocked even Trump staffers, the Journal revealed. When Attorney General Pam Bondi told America that she had the Epstein list sitting on her desk, the White House staff had no idea what she was talking about. And the FBI was caught completely off guard when she brought that gaggle of right-wing grifters into the White House and gave them a photo shoot with those “Epstein Files: Phase 1” binders.

The administration also notably tried to make the Epstein issue go away by having the FBI declare in July that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” on the Epstein case. That, of course, had the opposite effect.

“It was like a bomb went off after that statement went out,” a White House official told the Journal.

Now the Trump administration insists that it’s been fully transparent and done everything it could do to make the Epstein files public. That is not at all the case, as Representative Thomas Massie’s discharge petition argues.

“I told Director Kash Patel that the FBI has names of 20 men to whom Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women and girls. This basic fact seemed to surprise him. Why?” Massie said last Saturday. “Is the FBI withholding those names to protect the president’s rich and powerful friends? Release the Epstein files.”

This story won’t be going away anytime soon, no matter who Trump calls. From Massie to Epstein’s victims, to the base’s obsession, there is too much momentum to simply bottle it up and forget about it. And most of this is self-inflicted from the administration.

“This may be the worst managed PR event in history,” said former Trump legal team member Ty Cobb. “You’ve got multiple mouthpieces, and they’re all covering their own ass now.”