The future of arts funding

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New regime in Washington, new regime likely in Canada, and both of them pose serious threats to public support of arts and culture.

Let’s start with the US.

In 2017, Donald Trump became the first president since the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) were created by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 to attempt to wipe them out.

The NEA and the NEH are the two flagship programs for arts and humanities funding in Washington. There had been attacks on their budgets previous to Trump, usually, although not exclusively, by Republicans. Ronald Reagan proposed to reduce their budgets by half as part of a general effort to shrink government, but he met resistance in a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. He had to settle for cuts totalling less than 15 percent, most of which were restored by the time he left office. The Bushes largely left the agencies alone. Democrats Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, facing fiscal pressures, froze or trimmed funding for the NEA and NEH at times.

It was on Bill Clinton’s watch that the most serious cuts occurred. Clinton held office (1993-2001) at a time when the NEA was under fire for underwriting some of Robert Mapplethorpe’s homo-erotic and BDSM-themed art, and Andrew Serrano’s infamous “Piss Christ.” These works offended a portion of the public and a swath of elected representatives. Republicans gained control of Congress in the 1994 mid-terms and in 1996 cut the NEA’s budget from $162 million to just under $100 million.

That particular culture war passed and much of the funding was eventually restored, although there were long-term consequences. Even with occasional boosts in the Obama and Biden years, the NEA budget today is about $210 million, far lower than it was in the early 1990s taking inflation into account. That’s nothing for a country of 340-million people. What’s more, the agency, with the express intention of mitigating controversy, shifted its focus from supporting individual artists to funding arts organizations and programming.

While the general pattern has been that Democrats birth arts and culture programs and increase their funding, and Republicans threaten and occasionally scale them back, it’s not a hard-and-fast rule. There have usually been a minority of Republicans in Congress willing to break ranks and protect the budgets of the NEA and the NEH, not to mention those of the Institute of Museum and Library Services ($300 million), the Smithsonian Institution ($1.2 billion), the Library of Congress ($818 million), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting ($565 million), the National Archives and Records Administration ($985 million), the State department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural affairs ($730 million).

That’s why Trump’s 2017 proposal to eliminate all or most funding for the NEA, the NEH, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which supports PBS and NPR), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services went nowhere, despite Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate early in his term. Those agencies had friends on the hill. The bipartisan consensus was in favour of maintaining their budgets. Trump kept trying to kill them, and kept failing. In fact, the agency budgets were slightly increased by the end of his term.

Although neither the official 2024 Republican platform nor the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 mentioned cultural agencies, it might be different this time. There appears to be a recognition among the Trumpers that they utterly failed to reign in federal spending and “drain the swamp” in 2016-2020. The president-elect seems more determined to improve that record. He has announced the creation of DOGE, a Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which will be led by Trump-buddy Elon Musk and fellow entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.

Musk has said that it is possible to cut “at least $2 trillion” from the $6.75 trillion federal government, or 30 percent, by eliminating waste. It’s not. Debt servicing represents 14 percent of federal spending; defence (which Trump wants to increase) is 18 percent; entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare (which Trump says he’ll protect) are 34 percent; and veteran’s benefits are 5 percent. That’s roughly 70 percent of untouchable federal spending right there. The next 22 percent goes to the departments of health, education, agriculture, and transportation, which DOGE may slash, if it can get Congress on side, but can’t eliminate. There’s no viable path to 30 percent.

In a perverse way, the difficulty of reducing other spending puts the arts in greater jeopardy—something will have to be cut, and the cultural agencies are a rich target. Not rich in monetary terms—they represent less than 0.02 percent of total federal spending—but in symbolic value. The creative classes came out heavily for Kamala Harris this year. A big roster of celebrities, including George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, Madonna, Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, and Taylor Swift, not only endorsed the Democrats, but actively campaigned with Kamala. Some 200 artists led by Jeff Koons, Jenny Holzer, and Simone Leigh donated works to raise funds for the Harris campaign. On it went.

Trump knows that the arts community is hostile toward him and he’s not above retribution. Nor are his followers, who can be counted on to cheer if he succeeds in shuttering the NEA and NPR.

I’m not sure this generation of Republicans in Congress will be as willing to stand up for the arts as its predecessors; they’ll have to pick their fights with Trump, and if indeed he is better prepared and more aggressive this time, he’s more likely to get his way. It won’t have gone unnoticed in the Capitol that Ron DeSantis, the mini-Trump governor of Florida, effectively eliminated all funding for arts and cultural programs in the state budget earlier this year with minimal backlash from the broader public.

My guess is it’s almost certain federal arts funding will take a hit. How hard depends on whether or not this Trump administration is more competent than the last, and the backbone of Congress.

Which brings us to Canada. The Pierre Poilievre Conservatives have also ignored arts and culture in their political program to date, apart from an oft-stated promise to defund the English-language CBC. This is typical. I’ve written about the long-standing philistinism of our Conservatives in the Globe; Lydia Perovic has a more recent take on Substack.

The Poilievre Conservatives have tracked the Republicans in adopting a more working-class, populist orientation (just as the Liberals have followed the Democrats in becoming the party of educated elites). They give every appearance of wanting to seriously reduce federal spending and, like the Republicans, they tend to view federal arts programs as both a creation and a client of the other party.

What happens south of the border shouldn’t have any bearing on Canadian public policy. Poilievre isn’t Trump and Conservatives are not Republicans. But as we noted in SHuSH 252, “More American than the Americans,” Canadians are biddable. Big cuts to US arts and cultural programs will tend to legitimize similar cuts to our programs, at least among those in a position to make them. While there is a huge opportunity for the Conservatives to rationalize and focus Canada’s hodgepodge of antiquated and wrong-headed cultural programs, I’ve seen no indication that they’re willing to do the work.

Unfortunately, cuts would have greater consequences here than there. The US cultural economy is vast and, apart from the early years of the republic, the creative community has never relied upon public support. When DeSantis cut $32 million from Florida’s arts funding, billionaire Ken Griffin immediately stepped up with a $10 million donation to bail out Miami's Pérez Art Museum. That kind of thing doesn’t happen in Canada. The vast majority of Canadian creators are utterly dependent on public funding.

We’ll know Trump’s intentions by his first budget in early spring, and where Congress stands by summer.

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Mark Dykeman’s How About This: Atlantic Canadian interviews and thoughts on writing and creativity.

J. W. Ellenhall’s 3-Page Book Battles: Readers help her choose which of three random books to review each month.

Donald Brackett’s Embodied Meanings: “Arts music films literature and popular culture.”

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