Today, in “Groundhog Day, but without the fun parts” news: The Trump White House has announced its intention to destroy the National Endowment For The Arts, proposing a new budget that would fully eliminate the federal agency’s funding. If that sounds familiar, it’s because Donald Trump tried to do exactly this same thing eight years ago—your humble Newswire writer wrote it up then, too, which has certainly made for some of the bad kind of déjà vu today—but, hey, dang if he isn’t trying to do it all over again.
Those past efforts failed, basically because a bipartisan coalition in Congress blew them off: Funding for the NEA, which supports a wide variety of American arts programs to the tune of about $200 million per year, actually went up during Trump’s first term. (The NEA tends to spread money around pretty evenly, notably supporting arts projects in every congressional district in the country, which makes it fairly easy for representatives to back.) But while there are a frankly soul-draining number of negative things you can say about Trump 2.0, this administration has undeniably seemed to have gotten better at achieving its awful goals; it feels telling that, per The New York Times, the NEA had already begun forcing applicants to promise not to promote diversity, equity, or inclusion with their works, and Deadline reports that some of the agency’s grants have already been rescinded after Trump unveiled his proposed budget on Friday night.
Trump has been running a sustained attack on government support for the arts since before his latest term began, having installed himself as head of the Kennedy Center, and instituted massive cuts at both the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the National Endowment For The Humanities. The most surprising thing about any of this is that he’s waited so long to go after the NEA: The organization has been running without a formal leader since Biden-appointee Maria Rosario Jackson resigned when Trump took office back in January.
