GBH announced Tuesday that it is laying off 13 employees at American Experience, and pausing production of new American Experience documentaries.
“Severe cuts in federal funding for public media are requiring the system — including PBS and GBH — to make difficult decisions about programming and staffing at American Experience,” GBH President and CEO Susan Goldberg said in a statement Tuesday.
The flagship documentary series has won 30 Emmy and 19 Peabody awards over more than three and a half decades.
According to Goldberg, American Experience will present its 37th season of new documentaries as planned this fall, including “KISSINGER,” a portrait of the influential and controversial diplomat. In 2026, American Experience will run a selection of its best documentaries and digital content pegged to America’s 250th anniversary while GBH seeks to reinvent the series.
As Goldberg put it in her statement, “[W]e’ll continue to innovate new approaches for American Experience to explore compelling topics, tell stories known and never heard before and grow our audiences.
“Innovation is paramount in this moment of upheaval,” Goldberg added. “We need to do everything we can to ensure we can be here for generations to come.”
The cuts at American Experience follow Congress’ recent decision to claw back $1.1 billion in funding previously allocated for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which disburses funding to PBS, NPR and their member stations. Goldberg described that clawback as a “seismic event” in an interview with GBH News last week.
Prior to the clawback, also known as rescission, GBH had already cut 54 workers in 2025 and 31 in 2024, when the organization was facing a $7 million budget gap.
GBH produces several shows for PBS that are distributed nationally, including American Experience, FRONTLINE, NOVA and MASTERPIECE. Those shows are produced with funding from PBS that is drawn from dues paid by PBS member stations, some of which may cease operation in the wake of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s recent defunding or be unable to pay their dues.
In an interview after meeting with GBH staff Tuesday, Goldberg cast the American Experience cuts as a portent of things to come at public media outlets across the country.
“When Congress clawed back $1.1 billion of federal funding, there are going to be impacts,” Goldberg said. “And they are going to ripple across the system from coast to coast, and it will affect people no matter what their zip code or income or interest. ... When public funding goes away, there is no way to make up that money.”
But Goldberg also suggested that federal cutbacks could end up being a catalyst for significant improvement to programming in the long run — especially for shifting from a focus on televised content to content disseminated online.
“We’re going to reinvent how we’re doing [American Experience] on linear television,” she said. “We will reinvent, and really ramp up, though, our storytelling on digital platforms, because that is where the viewership is. That is where the audience is going and has gone, to a large extent, and it gives us a great opportunity to think anew about how to reach a new generation with these important stories.”
This story was reported by Adam Reilly and edited by Senior Assignment Editor Lisa Wardle and Senior Politics Editor Azita Ghahramani. No WGBH Educational Foundation official or GBH News executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.
