The Trump administration’s war on the free press is threatening to take down Stars and Stripes, the editorially independent military newspaper, after Defense Secretary Mark Esper proposed ending federal funding for the publication and Pentagon officials notified it to stop publishing on Sept. 30. But Congress has the right to appropriate money, and the House has already passed a bill including Stars and Stripes funding. It’s up to the Senate now, and a bipartisan group of senators is urging Esper to keep Stars and Stripes going.
“Stars and Stripes is an essential part of our nation’s freedom of the press that serves the very population charged with defending that freedom,” 15 senators—four Republicans and 11 Democrats—wrote to Esper. “Therefore, we respectfully request that you rescind your decision to discontinue support for Stars and Stripes and that you reinstate the funding necessary for it to continue operations.”
Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham wrote a letter of his own, while the group letter was signed by Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein, Dick Durbin, Patty Murray, Chris Van Hollen, Jon Tester, Richard Blumenthal, Doug Jones, Tammy Duckworth, Sherrod Brown, Maggie Hassan, and Kyrsten Sinema, as well as Republican Sens. John Boozman, Jerry Moran, Shelly Moore Capito, and Susan Collins.
Stars and Stripes gets $15.5 million a year out of a military budget of $700 billion, which the senators noted, with some understatement, was a “negligible impact” on the overall budget. They also called on Esper to “avoid steps that would preempt the funding prerogatives of Congress.” The four Republicans who signed the letter are all on the Appropriations Committee, which could include the funding in its defense appropriations bill.
Stars and Stripes was first published during the Civil War, and has been published daily since World War II. Kathy Kiely, a free press expert at the Missouri School of Journalism, wrote in USA Today that Stars and Stripes is “arguably one of the most powerful weapons our soldiers have carried into battle with them. As a publication that’s underwritten by the military but not answerable to the brass, Stars and Stripes embodies that most American of values: the right to speak truth to power.”
But cutting off funding for an independent military publication just as Donald Trump is in the news for expressing contempt for service members, especially those who are captured or wounded or died in service, would be very on-brand for the Trump administration.
