If there are any actual, as distinct from merely rhetorical, fiscal hawks in Washington, they should be calling attention to the dismal fact that the government added $838 billion to the national debt in just the first four months of fiscal 2025 (October through January). The lowest of the low-hanging fruit for budget-cutters is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, an ornamental entity, decorative but inessential.

Last year’s appropriation of $535 million brought spending on the CPB to over $15 billion since its 1967 founding. It was then a late piece in Lyndon Johnson’s mosaic of national perfection called the Great Society.

The CPB’s Public Broadcasting Service, launched 55 years ago, at least increased many Americans’ network television choices from three (CBS, NBC, ABC) to four. Thirty years ago, however, PBS improvidently adopted the slogan “If PBS doesn’t do it, who will?” Today, the antecedent of “it” can be almost anything, and the “who” will be many of the hundreds of channels available even on smartphones in scores of millions of Americans’ pockets.

In addition to today’s approximately 15,000 commercial AM and FM radio stations and more than 425 satellite radio channels in the United States, there are over 4 million registered podcasts worldwide, with more than 500 million listeners, an increase of 40 million in the past year. With this mind-boggling menu of choices, should we really spend more than half a billion dollars a year for a few more options, many of them duplicative?

The federal subsidy is about 15 percent of the funding for all public broadcasting. If the viewers, listeners and others who volunteer the other 85 percent enjoy the CPB’s offerings as much as they say, surely they will provide the other 15 percent. They should know that government’s share is a regressive transfer of wealth: The average American household income is less than that of the average income of PBS viewers and listeners to the CPB’s NPR.

According to Market Engenuity, an advertising firm, “If one were to combine the average statistics for PBS viewers on a national level, they would likely find a married homeowning woman who is in her 30s or 40s,” who “takes at least 3 vacations each year” and “holds a post-graduate degree.” PBS viewers are more likely than viewers of commercial television to be “highly educated, white-collar professionals.” And: “The PBS audience is 44 percent more likely to hold a doctorate degree.” Hence, says Market Engenuity, “the value of advertising on PBS.”

PBS is, of course, too sensitive and cultivated to call it advertising. It speaks delicately of programming “sponsorship.”

The CPB was created to provide services “responsive to the interests of people.” Note well: It was to serve people’s interests, not their preferences. For decades, CPB supporters often claimed that it was “for the kids,” meaning, primarily, “Sesame Street.” Now that children’s programming is abundant elsewhere, CPB now claims to be for America’s “most vulnerable people.” So says a former NPR executive, who, like most public broadcasting advocates, understands the importance of being earnest.

Who are these vulnerable people? “Very rural parts of the United States.” Yes, the flannel-shirted fellow on the John Deere tractor is to be rescued by NPR from what the very urban Karl Marx called (in the “Communist Manifesto”) “the idiocy of rural life.” By which Marx meant the absence of revolutionary consciousness. NPR could have fixed that among Europe’s 19th-century peasantry.

An axiom has it: The meek shall inherit the earth, but the affluent shall retain the mineral rights. They also will retain government entitlements for the comfortable, including CPB’s economically and intellectually upscale audiences.

Actually, CPB is like the human appendix — vestigial, purposeless and susceptible to unhealthy episodes. In 2025, it is a cultural redundancy whose remaining rationale is, amusingly, that government should subsidize its programing because so few want it. Commercial broadcasters cater to the vulgar multitude, so the refined few are left out, orphans with nothing to do but pout and reread Proust.

Government funding of CPB’s narrowcasting for its largely affluent constituency resembles agriculture subsidies for agribusiness. And as a critic has said — a defender of government-supported broadcasting — the “N” in NPR stands not for “National” but for “Niche.”

If Republicans mean a syllable of what they say about pruning federal functions, they will begin with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They will ask: If not here, where? And if not now, when?

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.