Eliminating the National Endowments for the Arts and for the Humanities
Among the proposed cuts in President Donald Trump’s first federal budget proposal is the elimination of four cultural departments: the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
Together, the agencies account for nearly $1 billion in annual spending. Last year, the federal government spent a total of $3.9 trillion. Nondefense discretionary spending, the area from which the four cultural programs would be cut, totaled $600 billion last year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
- The National Endowment for the Arts provides grants that fund things like art shows, musical performances and after-school arts programs across the country, Quartz explains in a piece that looks at where the cuts would be felt most. On a per capita basis, the primary beneficiaries of NEA grants are rural areas like Vermont, Wyoming and the Dakotas.
- Writing for The Federalist, David Marcus — who runs a Brooklyn-based theater project — argued that cutting NEA grants would be the best thing to happen to the arts in decades. In 1992, 41 percent of people had attended an arts event; 20 years later that number had fallen to 33 percent. Marcus argues that’s because NEA grants have tilted the incentives such that organizations can succeed financially even if they don’t appeal to audiences. Many theaters, he points out, derive just half of their revenue from audiences directly.
- The New York Times looks at the history of the NEA and NEA, created by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, the likelihood that the cuts are finalized and what sorts of programs would be eliminated — like an Ohio-based NEH project to archive photos, stories and uniforms from World War I.
- Conservatives have long sought to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which provides funding to NPR and PBS — outlets where they perceive liberal bias. Ninety percent of the CPB’s annual budget, though, goes to local radio and TV stations, not NPR and PBS, as the Washington Post described. Many of the hardest hit stations would be those in rural areas, with budgets that rely more on federal funding and less on listener support.
