Polednik: Trump’s budget numbers don’t add up on NEA, NEH

Through partnerships with state arts agencies, NEA grants fund arts programs to ensure freedom of thought, imagination and inquiry.

The Durham Arts Council has joined other organizations in urging Congress to keep funding for the National Endowment for the Arts after the Trump administration proposed removing it from the federal budget this week. The 2016 budget for the NEA was $148 million; a minuscule amount compared to most government agencies.

Cutting federal funding for public broadcasting, the arts and humanities have been a conservative talking point since President Lyndon Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act in 1965 and the Public Broadcasting Act in 1967.

But the NEA’s support of local artists is more than just funding, says Laura Zabel, executive director of Springboard for the Arts.

Greg Liakos, communications director for the Massachusetts Cultural Council, talks about the importance of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Coincidentally, the NEA and Arts North Carolina proposals happened to fall at the same time as several planned arts advocacy events.

Marcus said the loss of NEA funding will not stop people from making art.

Jeanie Thompson, executive director of the Alabama Writer’s Forum, said many of these individual categories aren’t often recognized as encompassing the arts.

For SAM, Rorschach said, the NEA’s checks aren’t as important as its global standing and, as she put it, its “good-housekeeping stamp of approval”, which opens the door for other funders and some other – less literal – forms of support, beyond dollars and cents.

Last year, the NEA provided $872,100 in funds to the N.J. State Council on the Arts. In the past two fiscal years, Durham has received $458,000 in NEA funding, DeVries stated. Those organizations include the Alabama Symphony, Alabama Public Television, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and others.

“The Double Edge Theatre which is located in Ashfield, Massachusetts, got a grant from the NEA this year, and it’s being used to raise the visibility of farms and artists and crafts people”, she says.

In intimate as well as large gatherings, these authors discuss their work and inspire all of us with ideas about everything from the Pony Express to late-onset language poets (which admittedly make a lot of Utahns groan), and from the history of internment camps in Topaz to the phenomenon of best-selling young adult dystopian literature inexplicably surging out of the Beehive State. People are very concerned.

Moyer said that SAMA would look for additional support from other sources, but “cuts in federal funding would impact program delivery and necessitate reductions in staff”.

Investing in the arts creates strong rural economic development efforts that help cities and towns promote the richness of their cultural heritage and support creative entrepreneurship.

But some question how much “trickle down” effect there really is from government spending on the arts.

“Funding to the NEA serves as a significant leveraging tool that has helped create an entire industry of locally based small businesses and jobs that can not be outsourced”, Bush said. And other programs, like open space preservation, use county and state funds.

“The teachers come from all over – rural Georgia, Ohio, Wyoming, Alaska, New York – and they go back to do their schools rejuvenated”, Spangler says.

After Trump’s budget was released Thursday, Seattle-area arts leaders and the city’s “rapid-response” team – which Sheehan is a member of – have been scrambling to hash out a proper response.

“NEH funding leverages millions and millions of dollars, multiples, beyond what the NEH is actually granting”, Grossman told TPM.

If we lose the NEA, we lose a program that not only makes our lives more vibrant and meaningful through the arts but that also boosts economies, offers educational opportunities and assuages poverty in communities in every state.