House Democrats on Thursday rejected a GOP proposal to cut federal funding to National Public Radio

, which has been under fire ever since it sacked Juan Williams last month.

The proposal, which was the winning entry this week in YouCut -- an anti-government spending program started by House Republicans earlier this year -- failed by a vote of 239-171.

With Democrats still in charge of the House until the end of the year, the proposal was doomed to fail. Lamborn's legislation to defund the Corporation

for Public Broadcasting (CPB) , introduced in June, hasn't made it out of committee.

But when Republicans assume power in January, they are expected to go after NPR's federal funding with a vengeance.

NPR says only 1 percent to 3 percent of its $166 million budget is funded by taxpayer dollars. But a new report by the Congressional Research Service found that taxpayers fund at least 4 percent of NPR's budget, while an analyst at the conservative American Thinker estimated it was closer to 25 percent.