The British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) charity arm said in a statement that it had been substantially affected by a loss of funding from the United States government.
“Like many international development organizations, BBC Media Action has been affected by the temporary pause in U.S. government funding, which amounts to about 8% of our income in 2023-24,” the organization said in a Tuesday statement. “We’re doing everything we can to minimize the impact on our partners and the people we serve.”
The BBC is the second media organization this week to make headlines for seeing a substantial amount of its funding lost after the Trump administration shuttered the United States Agency for International Development.
The agency refused to allow staffers from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to access its files over the weekend, leading the administration lock down USAID’s headquarters and announce that it was putting all non-essential on leave effective Friday.
Politico, which received more than $8 million the federal government in 2024, was also affected by USAID’s closure.
The BBC’s charity attempted to put distance between itself and the BBC, a public news organization funded by the British government. It added in Tuesday’s statement, “As the BBC’s international charity, we are completely separate from BBC News, and wholly reliant on our donors and supporters to carry out our work,” the organization
Musk responded to the statement in a message on X on Thursday, writing, “Why should American taxpayer dollars fund the British Broadcasting Corporation!? That’s insane.”
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Congressional Democrats have been calling for Musk to be booted from the Trump administration in the wake of funding cuts that have occurred because of DOGE under his watch. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee tried on Wednesday to subpoena Musk to appear before their committee, but failed to overcome Republican opposition.
House Democrats sent a letter to the White House on Thursday after the move failed, grousing that there was “no evidence that he, or any of his associates working under the ‘DOGE team’ moniker are entitled to access our government systems, nor is there any evidence that they have undergone the proper vetting to ensure the security of taxpayer and government data.”
Musk, meanwhile, had changed his biography on X as of Thursday to describe himself as “White House Tech support.”