The heads of National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service testified in a heated congressional subcommittee hearing on Wednesday amid a renewed Republican effort to defund US public media.

“NPR and PBS have increasingly become radical leftwing echo chambers,” said the Georgia Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene during her opening remarks, accusing NPR of having a “communist agenda”.

The hearing, called “Anti-American Airwaves: Holding the Heads of NPR and PBS Accountable”, was chaired by Greene who is head of a “delivering on government efficiency” group within the House oversight committee.

The Doge subcommittee hearing comes as the Trump administration, including the senior presidential adviser Elon Musk, wage a months-long campaign against public broadcasters and critical media more broadly. The FCC, led by a recent Trump appointee, opened an investigation into NPR and PBS in January. A day before the hearing, President Donald Trump said he would “love to” end public funding for the public broadcasters.

In their opening statements, the NPR CEO, Katherine Maher, and the PBS CEO, Paula Kerger, highlighted surveys showing public support for their broadcasting as well as programming intended to serve a range of audiences.

“For over two decades, the American public has consistently ranked public television as one of the best investments the government makes,” Kerger said.

Although Greene’s Doge subcommittee is separate from Musk’s “department of government efficiency” initiative, it bears the same ideological goals. Musk has likewise repeatedly demanded to defund public media. The world’s richest man also previously clashed with NPR in 2023 after he acquired Twitter and forced the broadcaster to be listed as “state-affiliated media” on the social media platform. NPR announced it would stop posting on the platform as a result.

Democratic members of the subcommittee repeatedly mentioned Musk in their statements, claiming that the hearing was a partisan distraction from Doge’s dismantling of government services.

“Leave Elmo alone, bring Elon in for questioning instead,” the Texas representative Greg Casar said.

The hearing also featured testimony from two witnesses representing each side. Mike Gonzalez, a fellow from the conservative Heritage Foundation thinktank, called for the dissolution of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and reiterated Greene’s argument that the internet makes government-funded broadcasters obsolete. The president and CEO of Alaska Public Media, Ed Ulman, spoke out on behalf of public broadcasters, stating that they were crucial for reaching rural communities and funding local news services.

While NPR and PBS receive part of their budget from federal funding, the majority of their funds come from other sources including corporate underwriting and donations. NPR receives about 1% of its budget from direct federal funding via the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, while PBS receives 16%. More than 70% of the CPB’s funding goes to locally owned public radio and television systems, however, making it a key source of their budget.

The subcommittee hearing on Wednesday is part of a longstanding rightwing campaign against public broadcasters, whom conservatives accuse of using government funding to produce liberally biased reports. Republican efforts to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which President Lyndon Johnson’s administration created in 1967, have persisted under every conservative administration since then but failed to convince Congress.

A renewed attack against NPR and PBS began last year, however, following a conservative campaign alleging leftwing bias and anti-Trump sentiment during the election. Conservative activists such as Christopher Rufo also seized on an essay from the then-NPR senior business editor, Uri Berliner, who claimed that the newsroom had prioritized diversity, equity and inclusion over journalism.

Multiple NPR journalists publicly criticized Berliner’s article as self-serving and misrepresenting the newsroom, including the Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep who wrote a blogpost dissecting the essay that stated “my colleague’s article was filled with errors and omission”. Greene and other members of the subcommittee cited Berliner’s essay repeatedly in their remarks, as well as repeating disputed claims from it during the hearing. Berliner later left NPR and joined the Free Press, recently writing an article entitled “What Congress Should Ask NPR’s Chief”.

Musk, who frequently attacks critical media outlets, joined in the initial conservative campaign against NPR and amplified its backers on X, the social media platform that he owns. In April of last year, Musk called to “Defund NPR” in response to a post from Rufo and described the broadcaster as a “hard-left propaganda machine” while retweeting Berliner’s Free Press essay.

Several members of the subcommittee questioned Maher over NPR’s coverage of conservative media-favored issues such as the leak of Hunter Biden’s laptop. At times Maher took a conciliatory tone, conceding that she would have covered Biden’s laptop differently and walking back statements made in old tweets that criticized Trump as racist.

The attacks on PBS, meanwhile, heavily focused on opposition to LGBTQ+ content in its programming. “They are now part of transing children, brainwashing children about gender,” Greene said of PBS on Tuesday during an interview on the rightwing channel Newsmax.

Greene repeatedly attacked PBS during the hearing over claims that it featured a drag performer on one of its shows, holding up a poster of the performer who she described as “child predator” and “monster”. Kerger responded that the performer Greene showcased did not actually air on PBS, but instead was a New York City affiliate station’s digital project in collaboration with the city’s department of education. Greene ended the hearing by playing a clip from the segment of the performer singing a children’s song, which she called “repulsive”.

“After listening to what we’ve heard today we will be calling for the complete and total defund and dismantling of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,” Greene said in her closing remarks.