Thoughts on Federal Arts Money After President Autopen

And why wallop libraries? They teach people to think for themselves.

A couple of times a year I write about the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute for Museum and Library Services. Together, they spend about $725 million. The NEA concentrates on museum exhibitions, performances, and public art projects. The NEH focuses on scholarship in the arts, history, and antiquities. IMLS concerns itself with archives, conservation, digitization, literacy, and enhancing access to the knowledge troves in our libraries. Through the Save America’s Treasures program and in collaboration with the National Park Service, the three agencies also make grants for infrastructure work at historic properties.

All three are on the chopping block.

Last week, the White House directed the IMLS — on whose advisory board I sit as a Trump appointee from his first term — and six other agencies to “reduce the performance of their statutory functions and associated personnel to the minimum” required by law. Republicans have tried to axe federal arts money since the 1980s, and I think this time it’ll happen. The IMLS, though, supports libraries, archives, literacy, and information technology for which it’s tough to raise money, and mostly for places with a minimal donor base. The IMLS staff? Think of the librarians in your life. They’re just as earnest, thorough, and altruistic.

I think DOGE is essential and overdue. The federal government has lost control of its finances, which will kill us. All I can say now is my experience on the IMLS board has been very positive and the staff is working to comply with the White House order. And I’ve been on library boards off and on for 40 years. Libraries are here so people can think for themselves. That’s the foundation of good citizenship.

I’ll focus on the NEA in this story since it awarded its latest round of grants in January — $36.8 million — and the last tranche of culture dough from the Biden era. It has also, of all the arts agencies, gotten especially squirrelly in its descriptions of winning projects. It’s a new wave of Minimalism. Among the 1,474 grant descriptions covering 230 pages are lots of stingy, vague one-liners like “to support an exhibition series,” “to support artist residencies,” and “to support a creative writing fellowship,” which puts me in a questioning frame of mind. I did some digging.

First, some questions. Does the NEA pack a meaningful, worthwhile punch? No. Is it captured by woke fads? Yes. Two months into the Trump 47 era in Washington, what’s changed, and what needs to change? Stay tuned. Does the NEA have the capacity to change? I doubt it.

Let’s look at its final Biden-era grants. BRIC Arts in Brooklyn is getting $25,000 to “support the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn festival.” Judging from photographs of past festivals, the 2025 event is likely to be black and Hispanic performers entertaining white Millennials who can afford to live near Prospect Park. The Center for Urban Pedagogy won $35,000 “to support the Making Public Policy graphic publications series,” which, I discovered, addresses “environmental racism” and resembles the graphics and rhetoric at the proposed Climate Museum I reviewed a few weeks ago. New York City’s Creative Capital Foundation has nabbed $30,000 for what seems to be DEI strategy-making. Luna Composition Lab’s $20,000 grant supports a music festival where performers must, we learned, be mentored by a “queer, gender non-conforming, BIPOC” music professional.

On the Left Coast, there’s money for the Telluride Film Festival, organized from Berkeley, Calif., and the most highbrow film festival in America, in one of the country’s most luxurious ski resorts. Can’t they raise the money privately? The Aunt Lute Foundation’s $75,000 in San Francisco supports “the production and promotion of audiobooks” and “updates to its database.” Sounds innocuous. The foundation is an “intersectional feminist” press, which, by definition, means the product is in fact inane.

Then there’s the explicitly inane. The San Francisco group Kulintang Arts has received $15,000 to produce “a new dance theater production to explore the colonial legacy of Philipinx nurses in America.” Philipinx? When General MacArthur said, “I shall return,” is this what he had in mind? At least the NEA is open about this grant but only because it’s seduced by the charms of putting “x” in terms describing the oppressed.

The Denver Art Museum got $30,000 for “an exhibition of work by Andrea Carlson,” who, I learned with a little digging, is a Native American artist who uses cannibalism as a metaphor for ethnic exploitation. Her works “confront colonialist appropriations.” If your child’s missing, check first at the museum cafe, and fast.

Project: Music Heals Us in Connecticut got $35,000 for a music program based on what Amanda Gorman wrote for Biden’s presidential inauguration, a poem that’s a comforting, mac ’n’ cheese serving of Black Lives Matter talking points. Dance Exchange in Maryland won $20,000 to convene a conference on artists and “the climate movement.” Texas Tech won $30,000 for a public art project on excessive heat in Lubbock.

This is a whole lot of flapdoodle.

On and on it goes. Intersectional racial justice; the slave trade during George Frederick Handel’s time; a musical adaptation of Justice Sonia Sotomayor children’s book Just Ask! Be Different, Be Brave, Be You; insecurities among young, black creative workers in Saint Louis; a fully “inclusive” production of The Wizard of Oz; and climate, climate, climate. I suspect that at least half of the NEA awards are race-driven.

So far, the cascade of Trump executive orders hits the diversity, equity, and inclusion projects that the NEA, the NEH, and the IMLS developed starting in 2021 in response to a Biden executive order. “Race explains everything,” the Biden White House decreed, and racial grievance was to be addressed — and promoted — wherever possible. All three agencies have furloughed their DEI staff.

The NEA canceled one race-driven program called Challenge America, which gave small grants “extending the reach of the arts to underserved communities.” The NEA said the Trump executive orders forbidding race-driven grants as well as those promoting gender ideology caused the demise of Challenge America. The money has moved to programs on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The IMLS is already supporting America 250 projects. The NEH should do the same.

The response to Challenge America’s demise has been knee-jerk outrage, hubris, and sanctimony. Jenni Werner, the director of the New Harmony Project, a group in Indiana that nurtures writers who explore “the complexity of hope,” wrote an open letter to the world. “At a time when racist, bigoted, and transphobic trends are being amplified at the highest level of the federal government,” she said, “the New Harmony Project will continue to be a just, equitable, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive organization.” And an organization without taxpayer dough. The group just won a $40,000 NEA grant, which I hope will be its last.

She sounds full of herself, and shame on her, she forgot to call Trump a Nazi. I looked at the New Harmony Project’s website. Its writers are mostly black and transgender. My impression is that it’s a waste of money, or it’s a CIA front, or both. It’s that nebulous.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the National Education Association are suing the feds over the elimination of the Challenge America program. Two more vampiric and parasitic groups are hard to find. They say that “gender ideology” is vague.

President Trump’s executive orders banning DEI in federal agencies and, implicitly, in the operations of federal grantees raise a question. Are museums with race-driven hiring, promotion, and evaluation programs eligible for federal arts money? I’ve read so many museum websites, press releases, and annual reports touting DEI as “integral to everything we do.” Does this mean they’re now ineligible for federal money? The question is pregnant with cans of worms, hornet’s nests, and sticky wickets. If the answer is “Hell, yes,” that might leave Hillsdale College as the only eligible applicant!

This won’t end life as we know it since, taking the NEA as an example, even its big grants are modest and, overall, the agency is philosophically muddled. It’s a pudding without a theme. And for all of the hubbub among conservatives about federal money for the arts, the dollar amounts awarded are even tinier since 40 percent of the NEA’s $200 million budget — and the NEH’s — goes directly to state arts agencies, which spend it as they please. A big chunk of the IMLS’s $295 million budget goes directly to state library agencies to spend at their discretion.

Where a strict ban on DEI-sodden applicants would bite — and bite deeply — is the federal indemnity. What is the indemnity? Congress created the indemnity in 1975 to minimize the cost of insuring American exhibitions that rely on international loans. It’s run by the NEA. Insurance costs for, say, a Rembrandt or Raphael owned by a European museum are immense since the values are high and getting the art here involves air travel. Over the years, works by Eakins, Homer, Hopper, Pollock, and Warhol, among others, have soared in value to more than $100 million. Commercial insurance was too expensive for museums, making it impossible for them to borrow works and bring them to the United States. Of all the NEA does, the indemnity is the most vital to museums. Over the years, it has saved American museums billions of dollars in insurance costs. It has brought thousands of works of art to American audiences.

I’ve looked at the DEI programs at most of the indemnified museums. The Phillips Collection’s DEI program, the first among major museums, is aggressive. It has an endowed DEI officer, which it calls a department chair, as if she’s tenured. It does anti-racism training for staff. It hires staff and picks trustees with race in mind. It’s got an “equity centered recruitment/onboarding process” and, I suspect, an HR system segregated by race and gender. The ideologies of “white privilege,” “systemic oppression,” “allyship,” “safe spaces,” and LGBTQIA+ERG animate the place. ERG is an “employee resource” committee, not three more genders, though Eunuch, Rude, and Guacamole spring to mind.

The Saint Louis Museum of Art, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Boston’s MFA, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the San Francisco fine arts system, owned by local government, are all DEI-infected, I’m sure. They have federal indemnities this year. If they’re as race-obsessed as the Phillips Collection, should they be able to get a federal indemnity? It’s not cash, but it’s good as gold. I’ve written that the federal indemnity should have strings attached — free admission to indemnified shows, for instance — but a ban on race preferences works for me, too.

All of these issues will ripen in the coming months and years. DEI, which is extreme affirmative action, is poisonous. Much cleaving-to-the-line will be needed to kill it in our culture.