Court dismisses CPB lawsuit against FEMA over NGWS funding

All claims in the lawsuit involving CPB and the Federal Emergency Management Agency were dismissed Monday, according to court documents, closing a nearly yearlong battle over funding oversight that fizzled due to CPB’s dissolution.

A stipulation of dismissal was signed by lawyers for the plaintiff CPB and the defendant FEMA, which is now in charge of the Next Generation Warning System that CPB previously managed under a contract with the agency.

CPB filed the lawsuit last March because it could no longer access approximately $38 million in grant funds that had been awarded through the Department of Homeland Security’s fiscal year 2022 congressional appropriation for NGWS. CPB warned station grantees to stop work on their projects and sued FEMA to release the hold on the funds.

After a federal judge denied CPB’s request for a temporary restraining order, FEMA temporarily released its hold on the funding in April. But by May, the NGWS funding had been cut off again.

FEMA filed a motion to dismiss CPB’s lawsuit July 22, days after the Senate approved the Trump administration’s rescission package that wiped out nearly $1.1 billion in CPB appropriations. After CPB announced plans to wind down operations and dissolve, filings have been limited to time extensions and stay requests.

Reimbursements to CPB and stations

During the first NGWS funding round under CPB, 45 public media stations were awarded a total of almost $25 million in grants that would reimburse expenses for technical upgrades, according to an archived CPB document.

A Jan. 30 status report from the court said FEMA “has reimbursed CPB for all expenses sought under the NGWS Grant and FEMA’s IPAWS team has been in regular contact with CPB regarding closing out the NGWS Grant. On December 15, 2025, CPB submitted a close-out report to FEMA.”

CPB waited for DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to sign the grant termination acknowledgment, according to the status report, then moved to dismiss the lawsuit.

Lawyers for CPB and FEMA did not respond to requests for details about the amount and nature of the expenses covered by the reimbursement.

Some stations whose NGWS grants were terminated received reimbursements for expenses they’d incurred before FEMA froze their grants.

KUCB in Unalaska, Alaska, had been awarded a grant of up to $224,081 for its project through the CPB-managed program. The station had spent $6,000 when the corporation told stations to stop work. GM Lauren Adams said those expenses were reimbursed last fall.

When KSTK Stikine River Radio in Wrangell, Alaska, received notification that its $90,002 NGWS grant had been revoked, it had already spent roughly half of that on the upgrade. The station received “full reimbursement for money expensed,” GM Cindy Sweat told Current in an email.

North Country Public Radio in Canton, N.Y., also spent about half of its $109,675 NGWS grant awarded by CPB and was “fortunate” to have been reimbursed, said Station Manager Mitch Teich in an email last year. This week, Teich told Current that NCPR is seeking other funding sources to complete the project.

FEMA revamps NGWS

Congress created and funded NGWS in FY22 as a FEMA program. America’s Public Television Stations lobbied for its creation as an investment in technologies that would strengthen public media stations’ public safety and emergency alerting capabilities.

CPB later won a FEMA contract to manage the program. In a competitive grant-making process, stations submitted proposals for public safety–focused technology infrastructure projects.

Congress continued to appropriate more money to NGWS. Lawmakers provided a total of $136 million in FY23 and FY24 and another $40 million in FY25.

In August, FEMA removed CPB as an intermediary in distributing NGWS grants and issued a notice of funding opportunity that limited applicants to states and tribal nations. The notice did not exclude public media organizations from eligibility as subrecipients of grants. Several stations later told Current that they were interested in seeking funding through the revised program.

In the notice, FEMA said it planned to award a total of five grants of $8 million each by Sept. 29, 2025. FEMA did not respond to Current’s requests for details about the NGWS grantees or the subrecipients, but USASpending.gov has records for 13 NGWS awards from FEMA.

Only two successful applicants received grants of $8 million — the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and the North Carolina Department of Public Safety. FEMA awarded nearly $7 million to Georgia’s Emergency Management and Homeland Security Agency. Grantees awarded less than $6 million included agencies in Guam, New Jersey and California and federally recognized tribes such as the Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake and the Blackfeet Tribe.

Representatives of public media stations in two states that received funds — Georgia and New Jersey — told Current they are unaware of subgrants awarded at the state level in their areas.

PBS North Carolina “worked closely” with state public safety officials on their successful application, Chief Broadcast Engineer Chris Pandich told Current through a spokesperson. “At this time, PBS North Carolina has not received a sub-grant from the FEMA Next Generation Warning System award to the North Carolina Department of Public Safety,” he added. “The sub-grant process has not yet begun, and to our knowledge no entities have received sub-grant awards yet. Our understanding is that North Carolina Emergency Management (NCEM) expects to begin the sub-grant process in the coming weeks.”

Objections in the House

After FEMA announced its NGWS criteria and application window, Democratic members of the House of Representatives objected to the new process. A Sept. 9 letter to FEMA’s then-Acting Administrator David Richardson criticized the short duration of the application window, saying it would “severely limit participation in this historically oversubscribed program.” Congress and members of the public “urgently need a clear plan from FEMA laying out how these grants will be administered,” the letter stated. Fifty-nine House Democrats representing 26 states co-signed the letter.

In December, Rep. April McClain Delaney (D-Md.) and Rep. Tim Kennedy (D-N.Y.), who both co-signed the FEMA letter, introduced the Emergency Alert Grant Fairness Act, which seeks to stipulate that NGWS “can operate as intended and directly support local public broadcasters,” according to a news release. H.R. 6463 was referred to the Subcommittee on Economic Development, Public Buildings, and Emergency Management Feb. 2. (The subcommittee’s ranking Democratic member, Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona, also co-signed the FEMA letter.)

McClain Delaney and Kennedy also co-sponsored H.R. 6201, which would require FEMA “to administer the Next Generation Warning System grant program and disburse obligated funds under such program, and for other purposes.”

“When NGWS was administered by CPB, broadcasters in all 50 states benefitted from the funds, but FEMA’s plan excluded most of the country,” said John Ewald, a spokesperson for McClain Delaney, in an email. “Between the Kennedy bill and ours, we have a backwards-looking bill to ensure awards from prior years flow, and a forward-looking bill to be sure that NGWS operates as Congress intended.”

Current Digital Editor Mike Janssen contributed reporting to this article.