"When a deadly landslide tore through part of Wrangell, Alaska, in 2023, there was only one place people there could go for information. "We're on an island, and there's one road, and everybody that lived south of that road lost everything — they lost their electricity, internet, television, phones," says Cindy Sweat, the general manager of KSTK, the community's public broadcaster. What was left, Sweat says, was the radio.
Months later, KSTK was awarded up to $90,000 in federal funding to improve that critical alert system. The money came from the Next Generation Warning System grant program, which Congress created in 2022 to reimburse the cost of replacing and upgrading equipment at public media stations that serve rural and tribal areas. But more than a year after KSTK's funding was announced, the station has only spent about half of the money it was awarded.
The project has been plagued by stop-work orders, Sweat says. In March, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which has been administering the program, sued the Federal Emergency Management Agency in federal court, alleging the Trump administration withheld grant funding CPB needed to pay back public media stations for investments they had made in emergency-alert systems. Then this summer, Congress clawed back public-media funding, blowing a hole in KSTK's budget. Sweat says her station can't risk spending money on the project without a guarantee it will be repaid.
"I haven't heard anything from FEMA," Sweat says. "So I don't know what happens next.""
Michael Copley reports for NPR August 28, 2025.
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