News broke a few weeks ago that President Trump would seek to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) in his next budget proposal, along with several other federal cultural agencies. Hours later, it was also widely reported that some of our current grants were being withdrawn and canceled with immediate effect.
These announcements have caused fear, anger, and bewilderment inside our agency. I find myself (as the historian for the NEA) in the unique position of explaining to my fellow employees how matters have reached this dire pass.
When I arrived at this agency in 2004, in the first years of the George W. Bush Administration, the staff was mostly composed of Democratic Party supporters. But they were also cognizant of the near-death experience that the NEA suffered during the so-called “culture wars” (which stretched from 1989-1998), when the agency was widely lambasted for providing sub-grants that were used for exhibitions which included Andres Serrano’s blasphemous work “Piss Christ,” as well as Robert Mapplethorpe’s sado-masochist and homosexual pornography.
The result of that foolish grantmaking was the restructuring of the NEA so that from then on 40% of our total budget was automatically awarded to state arts agencies, while an independent council was created to oversee the entire grants authorization process as a watchdog appointed by the executive branch.
The message from Congress was clear: the NEA had barely survived the “culture wars” because it had supported degenerate and obscene work—and it needed to steer clear of such dubious efforts if it wanted to survive in the future. Massive layoffs and internal restructuring were meant to drive the message home to the culpable leadership and staff.
Most of the staff I encountered when I arrived in 2004 seemed to understand that our grantmaking had to proceed with due caution and good taste so that the NEA would continue to exist. Focusing on “excellence” and “merit” was the key to that endeavor. The agency was not vulnerable as long as it aimed its grants toward “arts for all Americans.”
This was a harsh lesson that, sadly, too many people inside the NEA had forgotten (or never learned) by the second Obama Administration.
Rather than awarding grants on the basis of excellence and merit, the NEA’s leadership class inserted “equity” into its guideline protocols around that time, and it tasked the staff with including racial and DEI factors into its grantmaking. None of the NEA’s staff complained about these politically dangerous changes at the time. This was the fatal error that led eventually to our present situation, but the politicization of our grants and awards was welcomed by the staff since it fit their own personal political preferences so well.
The NEA was, once again, not supporting arts for all Americans, but only the agenda of one political party and its voters. These changes were gradual at first, then escalated to the level of the absurd as the years passed. No one involved noticed (or cared) that the agency was now regularly funding agitprop, such as a cabaret show with “bearded ladies” on ice skates singing about climate change, which members of Congress publicly ridiculed. By 2023, the NEA had ditched “the arts” entirely and was sending $12 million dollars to 112 left-wing organizations that simply demonstrated a “commitment to equity.” And since the NEA had long since abandoned the bipartisan and sensible path of hiring centrist and conservative employees to its staff from time to time, not to mention the selection of such people to its grant awards panels, there was hardly anyone inside the agency who could complain about this perilous and foolhardy path.
I did complain, but my advice was ignored over the course of the last three administrations until, finally, I was not consulted or acknowledged at all inside the agency.
Nobody said a word as the NEA’s grants became ever more political and shoddy, and ever more dangerous to our continued existence. Our popular Big Read program was sidelined, and then polluted with inferior books that celebrated the boutique left-wing concerns known as “woke” ideology. Our grants and awards were frequently given to works of dubious artistic merit because they fit the racial and sexual preoccupations of the moment.
The NEA had, once again, lost its way. The consequences for that abandonment of our mission have now arrived.
As agency staff look for answers to their current predicament, there will be a natural tendency to blame the new Trump Administration as uniquely hostile to arts and culture.
But this disaster was entirely of the NEA’s own making.
When the advisors to the new administration asked me after the 2024 election to counsel them on policy and personnel at the cultural agencies, what could I tell them in our defense? Had we resisted the temptation to destroy ourselves? What explanation could I offer for the reckless abandonment of our agency’s mission—our purpose—to bring the arts to all Americans?
When I was asked if the current staff could be trusted to implement the new administration’s cultural agenda and its grantmaking goals without a fight, what could I honestly tell them?
How could I defend the record that the NEA’s leadership had accumulated? All the grants and the awards that they had so foolishly chosen over the last few years? They had long since poisoned the arts with their politics. In the end, they only served themselves.