What’s at Stake if Trump Kills the National Endowment for the Arts

Trump is now expected to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, because we can't have nice things anymore.
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It's sadly fitting that the National Endowment for the Arts, one of the latest targets of President-elect Trump’s insatiable pique, began as an act of hope. While the idea that the arts “have a primary claim” on patriotic Americans can be traced back to a quote from George Washington, the New Deal established the first major federal arts funding for the practical reason of creating jobs during the Depression. By contrast, the 1965 creation of the NEA under President Lyndon B. Johnson embodied, as a history of the agency notes, only “idealistic optimism” that “functioned purely as an exaltation of the spirit.” Pretty stirring, right?

Well, say goodbye to that hopey, changey stuff. According to a new report in The Hill, the NEA would be “eliminated entirely” under plans Trump transition staffers are sharing with career White House employees. Same goes for the National Endowment for the Humanities, another independent federal grantmaking agency that was established in 1965 alongside the NEA. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would, paradoxically, “be privatized.” Artists needn’t feel lonely; the cutbacks would be part of a broader tightening of the purse strings at the departments of Commerce, Energy, Transportation, Justice, and State.

As the involvement of LBJ in its creation may suggest, partisan battles are nothing new for the U.S. agency charged with promoting and funding the arts across communities nationwide. President Ronald Reagan, as a former actor ostensibly an artist himself, planned to abolish the NEA when he arrived in office in 1981. Senator Jesse Helms, all riled up by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, helped lead another in a series of right-wing attacks on the endowment in 1989.

For free-market libertarians (we see you, absurdly self-impressed white guy on Facebook) and religious conservatives, the idea of federally funded art was probably always going to be a tough sell. But for the rest of us, to put this in context: what Trump would be destroying here is barely a rounding error in terms of the overall U.S. budget, but of great value to the artists it goes to support.

Besides, it’s not as if abolishing all that will balance the budget, let alone miraculously finance Trump’s proposed tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. According to NEA data, the endowment’s budget for fiscal 2015 was $146 million. That represents 0.004 percent of the overall federal budget, or 46 cents per American per year. It’s also almost one-third what the U.S. budget allocated last year for military bands. For an international comparison, the Canada Council for the Arts budgets eight times as much, on a per-person basis, with plans to double that by 2021.

And as The Washington Post points out, cutting $10.5 trillion from spending over the next decade, as the Trump team reportedly hopes to do, would mean eliminating virtually all of the government’s discretionary spending. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans’ budget resolution would, using their own estimates, add $9 trillion in debt over those same 10 years. With creative accounting like that, maybe the GOP likes art after all.

Historically, the agency has awarded thousands of grants for orchestras, jazz, operas, chamber music, and beyond. And just looking back through the past year or so, the array of specific programs affected by the endowment is dizzying. If you saw a video last year of David Bowie talking about working with Lou Reed, that was part of an NEA-funded digital archive. An Esperanza Spalding performance at Manhattan’s Baryshnikov Arts Center, a Steve Reich 80th-birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall, and a Quincy Jones tribute at the Monterey Jazz Festival are among endowment-boosted events from 2016.

Such funding has been crucial to at least one adventurous music festival contacted by Pitchfork. “The NEA’s support of Mission Creek Festival, via our parent organization the Englert Theatre, has been essential to our growth as a festival over the last two years,” says Andre Perry, co-founder of the Iowa City-based event, which this year has a lineup running the gamut from Floating Points to DIIV. “The funding specifically applies to our literary program and helps us support independent voices from across the literary spectrum—writers, publishers, editors—as well as connect them with our increasingly diverse communities here in Iowa. The bottom line: this funding is helping us to build and connect communities through culture. We think it’s important work.”

Underscoring that importance, synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani included a booklet of her successful 1976 NEA grant application in a limited vinyl edition last year. Going back further, no less a jazz luminary than Don Cherry reportedly received NEA funds in 1982 to put on music workshops in Watts, the primarily black community in L.A. where he spent his teens. In jazz alone, one of the NEA’s most lasting contributions is its Jazz Masters Fellowship, which over the years has gone to everyone from Miles Davis and Sun Ra to Freddie Hubbard and Von Freeman.

The current White House occupant’s ties to music are famously extensive, and the Obama administration has worked at the margins to keep music close to the heart of what the NEA does. The first Obama appointee to the National Council on the Arts, which advises the endowment chairman, was the violinist Aaron Dworkin. Obama-era recipients of the National Medal of Arts, an honor based on nominations through the NEA, have included Philip Glass, Berry Gordy, Quincy Jones, Meredith Monk, Sonny Rollins, Linda Ronstadt, James Taylor, and Allen Toussaint.

Not to get all “unkindest cut,” but what’s particularly staggering about Trump’s assault on arts funding is that, unlike so many of his other inflammatory proposals, it wasn’t necessarily expected. Former NEA chairman Rocco Landesman told The New York Times in mid-November that he didn’t “see anything apocalyptic” for the arts balance sheet with Trump arriving. (A message Pitchfork left for Landesman wasn’t immediately returned.) And as recently as December, in another of those bizarre turns that are increasingly getting #normalized, Sylvester Stallone was reportedly in the running to be Trump’s NEA head. (Yo, Adrian, he didn’t do it.)

If there’s any possible silver lining to Trump’s mercurial policymaking, which has thus far made Sarah Palin seem like someone you’d want to take SAT prep from, it’s this: His mind can probably still be changed. “People unfamiliar with the budget process may conclude that it’s already a done deal and the arts have already lost,” Kevin Erickson, national organizing director at the musicians-advocacy nonprofit Future of Music Coalition, tells Pitchfork. “It’s important to understand that there is a long fight ahead. And musicians and music fans alike should be prepared to join in that fight.” (It’s also worth noting that The Hill is so far the only source reporting this. We haven’t yet heard the final tweet.)

Thirty-five years ago, when another celebrity Republican came to the White House with a plan to slash the NEA, his administration eventually came to see the light. “The transition team really did want to de-fund it,” Barnabas Henry, who was head of a Reagan special task force on the arts and humanities in 1981, later told the Times. “So we put a lot of people on the task force like Charlton Heston and Adolph Coors who were close to the President, and we all thought the task force did finally persuade him that it would be a terrible thing to stop the federal support.”

Charlton Heston, eh? Tell Trump if he wants back those couple of quarters each taxpayer contributes each year to arts funding, he can pry it from our hands, which are very much alive, not noticeably tiny, and often warm from clapping at shows. Or better yet, convince him to let artists keep the pittance of support the government currently grants them.