With a late-night vote in Congress to cut PBS and NPR funding, Mitt Romney‘s vision has come to pass. During a 2012 presidential debate, the GOP nominee famously pledged to “stop the subsidy to PBS” even though he liked Sesame Street character Big Bird.

Roughly $1.1 billion of the targeted cut would defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the non-profit that supports NPR and PBS.

FAILED APPEAL: One local conservative guest columnist appealed to Congress to save funding for public broadcasting. Oklahoma's statewide PBS station, OETA, reinforced that we are all fellow Americans and patriots before we are members of a particular partisan club, Garrett T. King wrote in May.

Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski and Maine’s Susan Collins joined Senate Democrats in opposition to Republican cuts to organizations like PBS and NPR, and the smaller stations that they fund. While PBS and NPR would still continue at the national level, the cuts would likely devastate those local stations that rely on them.

After the first nine months of airing new episodes exclusively on HBO, Sesame Street will also be available on PBS for free. NPR takes a look at the agreement and its possible consequences.

Public TV stations will be “forced to make hard decisions in the weeks and months ahead,” PBS CEO Paula Kerger said Thursday, after the Senate approved a bill canceling all the federal funding for the network.