Trump budget battle may be looming over National Endowment for the Arts

WASHINGTON — Arts groups across the country are preparing to battle President Trump to keep intact the National Endowment for the Arts and the funding it provides to state and local groups.

Americans for the Arts is mobilizing some 5,000 local councils, agencies and funders and 300,000 “citizen activists” to flood members of Congress with calls, sign a petition to the White House and generally get the message out about the importance of the arts and federally funding them as Trump finalizes his budget in the coming weeks.

Americans for the Arts President Robert Lynch, who has also reached out to the White House himself, says he wants Trump and his team to know federal support for the arts creates jobs and stimulates economic growth, “the very things that the president is saying he wants to see happen.”

The White House has not said arts funding is in jeopardy, but multiple news reports citing anonymous sources have said Trump’s team is considering eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts in his proposed budget. And Trump's key economic advisers include director of budget policy and deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council Paul Winfree, an economist from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which put out a budget blueprint last year that included axing the NEA.

Officials at the White House and its Office of Management and Budget did not respond to messages seeking comment. Press Secretary Sean Spicer said this week that Trump wants to ensure the federal government “spends money more responsibly,” but he declined to provide details because the budget is still being crafted.

Victoria Hutter, spokeswoman for the National Endowment for the Arts, said agency officials have not seen anything yet from the Office of Management and Budget and so “won’t speculate on what is or isn't in the draft budget.”

A quick look at the agency’s Twitter feed, however, suggests there is worry. Still pinned at the top as of Thursday was a tweet from the day before Trump took office with a promotional video touting the importance of the endowment and featuring actors like Robert Redford, who says ”I’m loyal to the idea that the NEA not only survive, but grow.”

The National Endowment for the Arts was created in 1965 to invest in culture much the way the country had invested in science. Congress has decreased its budget in recent years from $167.5 million in 2010 to $148 million in 2016.

The agency distributes most of that — $112.5 million last year — to regional, state and local arts agencies and organizations around the country and in U.S. territories. The largest amounts in 2016 went to New York, California, Massachusetts, Illinois and Texas, a USA TODAY analysis of NEA grant data found. The smallest amounts went to West Virginia, North Dakota and Nevada.

On a per capita basis, smaller and more rural states came out on top, including Wyoming, Vermont and Alaska. It’s states like those that arts advocates say will be hit hardest if the federal spigot is turned off.

“NEA funds are a larger portion of the state arts budgets in some states with smaller or more rural populations,” said Pam Breaux, head of the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, which receives some support from the NEA. She said NEA grants acts as an “equalizer” with more populous states that have more resources for the arts.

The sheer reach of the arts funding — which goes to every state and territory — has helped garner support from more Republicans, said Lynch from Americans for the Arts, including members of Congress, who would debate how much money the agency receives or whether it is eliminated. The president can propose whatever he wants, but Congress is responsible for passing funding legislation, on which Trump would then have the final sign-off.

“I think they’ve actually tried over the last years to be very democratic in the small ‘d’ sense of putting grants out all across the nation,” said Lynch, whose group has also received NEA grants. “And that’s why there’s such broad support from Republican leaders, and so we are trying to work with those Republican leaders, contact them, to get them to be helpful in talking to the administration.”

Heritage Foundation economist Romina Boccia said the federal government should get out of the arts-funding business.

“Federal art grants should be eliminated altogether, and it’s not necessarily due to the budgetary savings that can be had there,” she said. “We should have separation of the federal government and the arts just like we have a separation of church and state. The arts are not a federal government priority. The arts are something that we do in civil society. It’s something that we do through our culture and that’s already happening. There’s no need for federal government involvement.”

Other budget hawks say that even if Trump does include the elimination of the endowment in his budget and it passes Congress, it won’t really matter unless Trump also overhauls Medicare and other entitlement programs, the largest drivers of growing U.S. debt.

“When you have debt higher than at any time since Harry Truman, everything needs to be on the table, but at the end of the day, anything we do to reduce agencies, reduce discretionary spending will help, but it’s only buying time,” said Marc Goldwein, policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “Ultimately, if we don’t slow the growth of health and retirement programs, nothing else matters.”

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