The End of
Publicly Funded Arts
in the US
Why the Trump-era hostility to the arts matters
By Stanley Lacy | June 11th, 2025
Newt Gingrich swept into power as the Speaker of the House in 1994. It’s a formative memory for me. I was a teenager and I saw the Republican party’s war on arts funding while just beginning to contemplate my career in the performing arts. Among other priorities in the “Contract with America,” Gingrich had called for the abolishment of the National Endowment for the Arts. His reasons were the standard culture wars rationale. A headline-grabbing exhibition by Robert Maplethorpe in 1989 offended many people. The “arts” were a haven of communism and hedonism, said the demagogues. “Urinating on pictures of Jesus,” to quote the former Speaker, should not be funded by the government.
Gingrich’s crusade resulted in a half-hearted defense of the NEA by Congress. Rather than being completely defunded, the agency had its budget decreased and a number of conditions placed on its grants. Solo artists could no longer apply for funding, only non-profit performing arts organizations designated 501(c)3 and with a minimum of three years performance history. Much of the agency’s budget was reorganized into re-grants to state and local government departments, such as the New York State Council on the Arts and NYC’s Department of Cultural Affairs.Grant applications would now be judged by panels of professionals and political appointees with expertise in the performance disciplines and subject to criteria and objectives that ranged from patriotic celebrations, to fostering collaboration with indigenous artists or minority populations, to programs designed for veterans or those with disabilities. Moreover, federal funding could no longer account for more than half of a project budget, whether that money came from the NEA directly or as a grant from a state or local agency using Federal funds.
Applying for NEA grants has long been onerous, especially for smaller organizations. Beyond the rigorous application itself and supporting documents, other credentials required, such as SAM certification (the federal government’s payment authorization system) each have their own cryptic procedure for procuring them. There is a pre-application with a deadline about a month before the actual application opens. The application must be submitted through an online portal open for only seven business days, and because the application is not fully viewable ahead of time and requirements change year-to-year, much of the information must be entered, amended, or corrected during the week-long window. The Government calculates roughly 60 hours of work to complete the application, which seems right to me. At the company I founded, that meant that for a week a colleague and I did practically nothing else but work on the application.
If one successfully runs this gauntlet and is awarded an NEA grant, the agency funds a project for an amount of $10,000 to $80,000 reimbursed to the organization after the performance and subject to an audit of receipts and budgets. At least, that was what could be expected prior to May 3rd, 2025.
This spring, organizations received letters cancelling the grant offers for the performance period between January and May of this year. The letters read in part, "The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President ... [c]onsequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities." Changing rules in the middle of the game is always disruptive, but for some of these organizations, these cancellations announced after most of the performance period has elapsed means that artists’ contracts or vendor invoices may go unpaid, or that a project budget shifts a company’s leger into the red. Some companies may even shutter their doors as a consequence of this action given the difficult climate for the performing arts since the pandemic and how close many organizations are to bankruptcy at even the best of times.
Trump’s second term has been openly combative with performing artists, beginning with his takeover at the Kennedy Center. Donald Trump had himself elected Board President and then ousted the experienced general director and replaced her with Richard Grenell, a controversial diplomat, former interim National Intelligence Director, and sometime Fox News contributor to run the center, despite having no previous experience in the arts. Trump is on record that he plans to eliminate the NEA, and with his appointments and cuts even to funds that were already approved for disbursal, he seems to be making good on that threat.
During his first term, President Trump eschewed the Kennedy Center and never attended the Kennedy Honors, defying long-standing precedent. In all his years as a socialite in New York, he was never notably involved with the city’s arts scene. There are no Trump concert halls or museum wings—plenty of golf courses, though. He was never a notable supporter of the Metropolitan Opera, the NY Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, Shakespeare in the Park. Save for a one-time gift of $15,000 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006 by the Trump Foundation, it is difficult to uncover a contribution by Donald Trump to any arts organizations in the area. So why is this President suddenly so keenly interested in the national arts landscape?
Perhaps it is only to “own the libs.” After touring the Kennedy Center, he bemoaned that it was difficult and expensive to have a command performance by Lee Greenwood on short notice. He told the Kennedy Center staff in a phone call that the programming had gotten too “wokey,” and that he was gonna make it “hot” again. Trump seems to want the American arts scene to reflect his notions of patriotism. In his first term, Trump had the National Endowment for the Humanities commission a “National Garden of American Heroes,” proposing statues to Elvis, MacArthur, Columbus, and Scalia, among others. (Biden cancelled the order but now Trump has cancelled the cancellation). Maybe he wants nothing more than to feed red meat to the Republican base about the good old days before transpeople and immigrants destroyed everything about the country. Or perhaps there is a more sinister reason.
Totalitarian leaders exert control over the artists in their country. Mao cracked down on artists disparaging the government in the Cultural Revolution of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s. Stalin commanded that art must draw a realistic and flattering portrait of the Russian way of life. Hitler’s Third Reich extolled the purity of the Teutonic musical tradition of Brahms and Wagner and relegated the music of Mahler and other Jewish composers to the scrap heap. Despots demand uniformity of opinions from their subjects and artists are known to push these boundaries. Trump demands that the arts conform to his worldview, like he demands the press treat his lies as if they were truths, with the goal of suppressing any opposition to his leadership.
That is why it should matter to us. It is easy to dismiss this arts crisis as unimportant in a world with so many pressing concerns, from the abduction and rendition of US residents to foreign prisons and the possible suspension of habeus corpus, to the assault on healthcare, education, medicare, disaster response, or any of the other crises set off by the destructive actions of the President. These authoritarian actions demand a strong response. Artists have one at the ready. Performers, painters, actors, playwrights, musicians, and sculptors will condemn the administration for the eyes and ears of history. Trump will do everything in his power to stop them.
What goes missing when public arts funding disappears? Some organizations, as I said, will disappear entirely leaving darkened theaters and halls. If the stream of funding from the NEA slows to a trickle or comes with such strings as Trump frequently uses to punish those who refuse to kiss his rings, organizations that do survive will need to raise earned revenue to compensate. That will mean fewer free and reduced-price ticket programs that give access to the arts to underserved populations, and fewer public concerts at venues like Central Park, or Bryant Park in the city, or even our beloved Sousa bandshell by the water. It could mean no more free admission days at museums. It will mean that companies take fewer risks with programming, preferring to offer programs they know will sell well or which can be produced on limited budgets. For a new hit play to hit Broadway, that show was likely workshopped at a small regional non-profit theater where risks can be taken. Hamilton debuted at The Public, not on 42nd Street. Absent that refining process, producers will choose to offer revivals of past productions or simple, one-person showcases that can easily recoup their investment. Tight funding environments stifle creativity, even before the Trump regime prosecutes its war on wokeness to deny grants to left-leaning organizations or for programs that are inclusive and representative of traditionally persecuted or marginalized groups.
Unlike some of Trump’s efforts, which can likely be overturned in the first week of the next Democratic administration, the loss of arts funding promises to be more permanent. Few people are speaking out about this arts crisis and the hardship it will place on American companies, artists, and performers, nor the hole it will leave in the fabric of our culture when some of these programs and companies inevitably disappear. For most of its history, the US only sporadically funded the arts. It took the visionary leadership of JFK and the steely maneuvering of LBJ to create the NEA in the first place. It may be a long time before a US president and Congress can again agree to do those things that enrich our society; not merely sustain it against the attacks of the emboldened right wing.