What Gets Lost When Federal Arts Funding Gets Gutted

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is being dismantled in plain sight. Within days of President Trump’s “skinny budget” announcement, the NEA saw a mass employee exodus, and previously obligated grants were unceremoniously cancelled across the country. For many artists and arts advocates who’ve worked to build equitable and enduring support for artists in America, this moment feels like a catastrophic unraveling. And it is. 

But this dismantling also undermines crucial backstage maneuvering within the NEA during the previous administration to build more comprehensive support for artists. And, while many arts advocates are rightly fighting for lost funds, economic recovery advocacy alone risks masking the crucial systems change work at the NEA that was quietly underway. So, while it is tempting to surrender to despair, we who care deeply about artists need to fight for the entire support system that is being unraveled.

The abrupt cancellation of these emergent programs under Trump does not only deplete funds—it undermines infrastructural efforts to re-define “equity” as an institutional practice, not a grant-seeking buzzword.

For context, some recent history: In the wake of a global pandemic, racial justice uprisings, and economic collapse, the Biden-Harris administration introduced executive orders abiding a “whole-of-government” approach to policymaking. Executive Orders 13985 (advancing racial equity) and 14084 (promoting the arts and humanities) specifically required federal agencies to identify and structurally address baked-in systemic biases across all areas of governmental oversight. At the NEA, this mandate generated significant reforms: revised grant guidelines, evaluation criteria, and shifts in operations to increase access for historically under-endowed groups. While these orders went up in smoke on the day of Trump’s inauguration, their impact merits reflection because Biden’s top-down incentives motivated NEA leadership to quit responding to demands for inclusion representationally—by increasing access to existing programs—and begin re-engineering the agency’s entire approach to arts recognition and resourcing. Characterizing the present-day retrenchment of NEA funds under the Trump administration as a total abandonment of artists too swiftly erases these infrastructural efforts to transform exclusionary aspects of grantmaking that the agency’s influence created (interested readers can access an open-source monograph detailing this history of distributionally unequal support in dance). Inside of the NEA, institutional cooperation built new, more just models of support and attracted millions of dollars in economic investment from non-arts policy areas. This bureaucratic angling was starting to strategically shift the agency’s historic identity from that of an arts grant maker to that of a bridge-builder, maximizing support for the arts in powerful and unprecedented ways.

Under the enigmatic leadership of former NEA chair Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, the agency was intentional about removing barriers thwarting access to federal arts support. One emergent program, ArtsHERE, offered non-matching funds ($65,000–$135,000) for artists pursuing justice through arts participation. In an almost unprecedented shift, the agency eliminated cost-share criteria and explicitly targeted cultural organizers of color, artists from rural areas, and disabled artists who were not previously on the agency’s radar. Grant guidelines eased burdensome reporting in order for grantees to focus their energies more squarely on artmaking. Program evaluation was outsourced to paid researchers, a move that finally rejected the ubiquitous and deeply misguided expectation by funders that artists should double as data analysts. The abrupt cancellation of these emergent programs under Trump not only depletes funds—it undermines infrastructural efforts to re-define “equity” as an institutional practice, not a grant-seeking buzzword.

One of the most devastating and less visible impacts of the potential NEA defunding would be the loss of the agency’s power to convene democratic discourse. Here, the impact of Jackson’s leadership cannot be overstated. On 30 January 2024, the NEA and White House Domestic Policy Council co-hosted “Healing, Bridging, Thriving: A Summit on Arts and Culture in our Communities,” a gathering of over three-hundred policymakers, artists, and arts intermediaries to explore how artists contribute to building healthier and more humane communities. As an attendee at the summit, I heard Chair Jackson credit “unprecedented support from the White House” for incentivizing this high-level gathering focused on embedding artists across industries and areas of government oversight. Crucially, Jackson’s words were coupled with deeds.

Throughout the seven-hour event, policy leaders introduced new programs drawing federal resourcing from non-arts sources to support art and artists. In the realm of public and military health, then-surgeon general Vice Admiral Vivek H. Murthy and then-assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Admiral Rachel Levine announced a $5 million investment in the formation of an interagency initiative^⁠ on arts and health infrastructure. December 2024 saw the dedication of $150,000 in non-matching grants to nine projects integrating arts engagement to address mental health disparities. The remaining millions are part of what the present administration has rescinded. Later in the day, Chair Jackson was joined by leaders from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to announce an investment of $1 million to commission artists to protect United States estuaries and urban waterways. Then-chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Shelly C. Lowe (Navajo) also announced “United We Stand: Connecting Through Culture,” a $13 million partnership uniting artists and humanists to promote cross-cultural understanding in local communities experiencing intense polarization. Such interventions evidence the extent to which NEA insiders leveraged the agency’s convening power as a national policymaking body to renew its purpose to promote arts integration and grow multi-sector investments in creativity across all US sectors and industries. The programmatic and economic models that emerged through the above pursuits are a clear casualty of the deferred resignation of NEA staff. I mention these moves here to underscore their utility as blueprints for revolutionary systems that were being collectively re-imagined.

The institutional disintegration of the NEA has also demolished unprecedented partnerships and investments in artists across the entire executive branch.

For all of this talk of infrastructure—the hidden supports that make the arts possible—the loss of actual money does matter. And for artists of all backgrounds and career stages, an NEA award can be groundbreaking. Without a doubt, the recent termination of previously obligated NEA grants derailed thousands of projects. Terminating the NEA will also inarguably gut vital indirect resources for arts access nationwide. Redistributed NEA funds enable regional, state, and local arts agencies to support activities in 678 Congressional districts that private arts philanthropy does not reach. And despite the language of “inefficiency” being used to justify the current retrenchment of NEA support, the benefit of federal subsidies to all states and jurisdiction comes at a nominal cost: The NEA represents .004 percent of the federal budget, or less than 62 cents per American per year. As regional arts policy makers recently argued, this “low investment, high-return model” offers a rare example of governance in service to the public good. In other words, it is fair to argue that creativity as a public good is a huge part of what gets lost when federal agencies are gutted. But what is important to add, and critical to understand amidst current arts advocacy efforts, is that the institutional disintegration of the NEA has demolished unprecedented partnerships and investments in art and artists that span the entire executive branch.

Despite the Trumpian trumpeting of king-like control over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the NEA is a clear target of the current administration’s scorched-earth tactics. In the face of this threat, I have labored here to show what briefly bloomed because of measured, cross-sector risk-taking by those on the institutional inside. What I call infrastructural artistry—co-creative systems change work within historically inert institutions like government, higher education, and philanthropy—will vanish if we train our eyes too narrowly on arts grants or too tightly on the hate-filled wrecking ball of hostility spinning toward us. Inside of the NEA, people were performing crucial systems change work, working together and across areas of expertise to build a more equitable US arts infrastructure. Jackson’s astute vision and artful facilitation challenged NEA bureaucrats to experiment, invited the uncomfortable practice of self-reflexivity, encouraged action beyond precedent, and undertook one of the most difficult but essential tasks for gate-keeping institutions invested in centering justice and equity—to relinquish default ways of working. And long-overdue change was indeed happening.

Inter-agency, multi-sector arts experiments were radically expanding opportunities for artists through strategically rerouted federal funds—often from outside the NEA itself. And although grant applications continue to pour in at the agency, evident demand was being met, in part, by tactically “de-sectorizing” arts investment and locating unlikely partners to widen opportunities. Leveraging the agency’s power to convene a national discourse, NEA leadership and staff started embracing the practical reality that Artists Work Everywhere. This tiny but mighty agency was steadily transforming aspects of arts policymaking that have historically siloed artists, industries, and communities. It is, frankly, a big deal (to me) when funding bodies reflexively and structurally addresss aspects of arts grantmaking that their institutional influence created because these same systems have kept structural exclusions in place. With so many NEA key players now dispersed from federal service, it becomes harder to see hope in the times ahead. The future of such crucial systems-change work is weighing heavily on my mind.

But if we can agree, at least, that artists contribute to democracy, then nobody fighting for art and artists can afford to get distracted from the reality that nonprofit, project-based grantmaking in the quote-unquote “arts sector” is a flawed model of support for US artists. In 2025 artists can barely afford anything! So, because artists need stronger economic and social safety nets, we need to keep this infrastructural artistry in mind as we fight our respective fights.

The question remains: Can the fight to save the NEA double as a fight to let bygone systems fail?