Don’t Cry for Elmo, He’s Filthy Rich

“Elon Musk and Marjorie Taylor Greene are trying to defund Sesame Street and dismantle PBS and NPR,” Rep. Robert Garcia claimed during hearings on the two radical leftist organizations.

“The Trump administration’s abrupt federal grant cuts have made their way to ‘Sesame Street’—and they risk pulling the rug out from under children,” Fortune Magazine claimed.

“Sesame Street’s Future Is in Jeopardy”, Newsweek moaned.

“Why Does Big Bird Look So Sad?” the New York Times asked. According to the paper, the Trump administration’s cuts to USAID “stripped Sesame Workshop of some valuable grants”.

The USAID grants in question were $20 million to make an Iraqi version of Sesame Street. The Sesame Workshop previously got over $4 million to make a Bangladeshi Sesame Street and $18 million from the Pentagon and GSA to make a Sesame Street for military families.

Even assuming that there was some justifiable reason to spend $20 million making a Sesame Street for an oil-rich country which just passed a law legalizing adult men marrying members of the Sesame Street viewing audience, it has nothing to do with funding the American series.

And $20 million might be a big number somewhere, but it’s a drop in the Sesame bucket.

Every time members of Congress discuss cuts to PBS, Democrats hide behind Big Bird and Elmo, even sending the giant yellow creature to Congress in the nineties, but only 4% of Sesame Workshop’s revenues come from the federal government. If it all went away, even Count Von Count would hardly notice. 4% of Sesame Workshop’s budget wouldn’t even cover the salaries for its C-suite which were in excess of $6 million in the last reported year.

Sesame CEO Stephen Youngwood makes over $1 million a year, President Sherrie Rollins Westin earns $864,748 a year and together with the rest of the top executives account for enough money to bring Sesame Street to at least three different Islamic terrorist states.

Sesame Workshop took in $187 million in 2023 and $271 million the year before that. The non-profit has assets of $607 million. Over the last decade, those assets more than doubled.

A non-profit with over half-a-billion is not about to disappear if we stop funding Jihad Street in Iraq. The real question is why were taxpayers ever subsidizing one of the wealthiest non-profit production companies associated with PBS which can print money by selling merchandise?

20% of Sesame Workshop’s revenues come from licensing. 50% from distribution fees and royalties. Millions of dollars continue pouring in from toy and music licensing.

Sesame Street already gets sizable amounts of money from liberal foundations and billionaires like Michael Bloomberg, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, the MacArthur Foundation, and even CEO Stephen Youngwood chipped in under $49,000 of his million dollar salary and Sherrie Westin under $100,000 of her nearly seven figure salary to the Sesame Workshop.

And they can probably afford to chip in some more if Sesame Workshop is really in trouble.

The real nightmare on Sesame Street came not from the end of its nonprofit work or PBS productions, but the end of HBO MAX’s lucrative deal to screen and showcase its episodes. The HBO deal made it clear that Sesame Street was not primarily a public television property. But as Discovery, HBO’s parent company, began cutting costs, the Sesame Street deal was a casualty. It wasn’t Republican budget cuts that hurt Sesame Street, but cutbacks by the Hollywood studio most closely associated with funding BLM and other radical leftist movements.

Another crisis was caused by the Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU), one of those baffling conglomerate unions of bureaucrats that includes everything from Canadians to minor league umpires to leatherworkers, trying to unionize Sesame Street employees.

These much more serious blows to Big Bird came from lefties, including unions, not Trump, but you won’t see Democrats talking about how unions are trying to kneecap Elmo.

The USAID grant to make Sesame Street in Iraq does point to one source of the organization’s financial problems, which is that it spends too much of its budget on international programming while getting little in the way of its revenues for licensing everything from toys to puppets in international markets. Sesame Workshop brags about all the work it’s been doing in Ukraine, Lebanon and India. And that’s work that American taxpayers and audiences subsidize.

Sesame Street needs to decide whether it wants to make puppet shows for American kids or for the children of the world. Big Bird and Elmo remain lucrative in America, but there’s no reason for American taxpayers to be subsidizing Sesame Street’s outreach to Syrian migrants or teaching children in India about gender equality.

Democrats used to pretend that budget cuts to PBS threaten Sesame Street, now they admit that they’re no longer using Big Bird as an avian or puppet shield for PBS but for USAID. Elmo isn’t just being used to defend subsidies for American public television, but for Iraqi public television, and even families with faded Grovers in the house will draw the line there.

Sesame Workshop needs to choose between Sesame Street and Iftah Ya Simsim, Sim Sim Hamara and the other Sesame Streets for the Muslim world. The Pakistani Sesame Street previously had its funds cut off in 2012 over allegations of fraud and Sharaa Simsim, the version that airs in the Muslim terrorist-occupied territories in Israel, after its leaders rejected a joint production with Israel, had its funding cut over its problematic content.

Daoud Kuttab, the executive producer of Sharaa Simsim, the ‘Palestinian’ Sesame Street, wrote that the “Hamas’ operation against Israel on Oct. 7 was carried out on the basis of the internationally sanctioned right of people to resist” and that Hamas leaders did nothing wrong.

His ‘Palestinian’ Sesame Street, was funded by USAID,

Kuttab, who often pops up representing the ‘Christian’ point of view, also claimed that the Hamas attacks were a response to “Jewish supremacy” for offending Muslim religious sensibilities by praying at a Jewish holy site claimed by Islamic conquerors as a mosque.

But when funds for Jihad Street were previously pulled, Brookings published an op-ed claiming that, “Congress Makes Elmo Cry by Defunding Palestinian “Sesame Street”. And Kuttab recently resurfaced in the New Republic with an op-ed titled, “I Worked on the “Arab Sesame Street.” It Was Not a Waste of Money” in which the terror apologist claimed that American taxpayer funding for it encouraged “peace and tolerance among children of the Middle East”.

If ‘Palestinian Elmo’ didn’t want to cry, he shouldn’t have joined Hamas. And if the Sesame Workshop wants to justify its $6 million C-suite salaries, it should stop working on international shows and go back to its original mission of entertaining and teaching American children.

Merchandising and licensing makes Sesame Street financially viable and quite profitable in the United States and some western nations. The real problem is that Sesame Street became a vehicle for foreign aid and government grants in the third world.

And that is what’s threatening Big Bird and making Elmo sad.

Sesame Workshop is in trouble because it puts American kids last. Sesame Street should go back to being a street in the U.S.A. and not in Pakistan, Bangladesh or Hamastan.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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