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New Mexico legislators are set to discuss how the state could help keep public broadcasting on the air at a special session on Wednesday.

Nationwide, the Rescissions Act signed by President Donald Trump cut more than $1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The cuts put many rural outlets, including those that disseminate emergency information to tribal communities, at risk of closing.

Rashad Mahmood, executive director of New Mexico's Local News Fund, said the state lost almost $6 million distributed by CPB, a nonprofit organization created by Congress in 1967 to support public broadcasting.

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"A lot of our rural public media stations in New Mexico got very large percentages of their budget from the CPB," said Mahmood. "There's several tribal stations that got almost all their funding from the CPB, essentially."

Mahmood said several New Mexico radio stations support their communities by translating programming into Navajo to serve the Navajo Nation, which spans across New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.

A lasting example is KTDB, founded in 1972 – one of the country's first Indigenous-owned and operated radio stations.

In many rural parts of the state, public media is the only source of reliable local news. And Mahmood said some outlets aren't likely to stay afloat even if local residents increase contributions.

"If you're based near Albuquerque or Santa Fe, you have a wealthier population base to draw upon to support your work," said Mahmood. "But if you're serving lower-income parts of the state or rural parts of the state, how much money is it reasonable to expect that you would raise from the community that you serve?"

The Knight Foundation and MacArthur Foundation, along with other philanthropies, pledged nearly $37 million in emergency funding in August to support public media stations facing closure due to federal funding cuts, but it's not known if that funding will be ongoing.