Story of the Week: Will President Trump Kill the National Endowment for the Arts?

Last Friday, the White House released its discretionary budget request for fiscal year 2026, which included a recommendation to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).

Story of the Week will explain why the NEA is important to American theaters. We will also evaluate the prospect of the agency shuttering. But let’s begin with a stroll down memory lane.

What is the National Endowment for the Arts?  

The NEA was created in 1965 as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s sweeping “Great Society” plan to wage war on poverty and expand social welfare. It is governed by a chairperson (appointed by the president) who is advised by the 25-member National Council on the Arts (18 of these members are also appointed by the president). Since the departure of Biden appointee Maria Rosario Jackson, the NEA has been without a chair and President Trump has declined to nominate one.

The agency’s primary responsibility is distributing funds to American arts (and arts education) organizations, which apply for the money through a rigorous grant process. The paperwork can be onerous. Many larger not-for-profit theaters have a dedicated employee (or several) to apply for grants like these, from both the government and private foundations.

Giving taxpayer money to companies that don’t calibrate their programming to the opinions of the average American taxpayer, the NEA has long been in the crosshairs of both small-government and religious conservatives (i.e. the Republican Party). As far back as 1981, members of Ronald Reagan’s transition team wanted to eliminate the NEA, but this plan was ultimately thwarted by a counteroffensive that packed the President’s special task force on the arts and humanities with the Gipper’s old movie star friends, like Charlton Heston. By 1989, the NEA’s budget was $169 million, the highest it had ever been.

But opposition to the NEA continued, and was especially energized by exhibitions by the photographers Andres Serrano and Robert Mapplethorpe, whose homoerotic subjects particularly enraged religious conservatives. By the mid-90s, the House of Representatives, led by Newt Gingrich, successfully slashed the 1996 NEA budget to $99.5 million.

It has since rebounded, although not nearly to where it was if one factors in inflation. And that hasn’t stopped Republican efforts to kill the NEA or use it to exert control over grant-accepting arts organizations.

In February, the NEA sent out new guidelines to grant applicants requiring them to comply with the president’s executive orders banning federal funding for DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) programs or anything that promotes “gender ideology.”

Starting last Friday, in conjunction with the announcement of the president’s budget request, the NEA began notifying arts organizations that it was canceling grants that had already been recommended, including $30,000 for the small off-Broadway York Theatre Company, which used that money to produce a developmental reading series for new musicals. “The loss of this support is, to say the least, deeply disappointing,” the company said in an e-mail statement that included a fundraising ask for loyal supporters. It was just one of many sent out in the last week.

How much money does the NEA distribute to American Theaters?

The NEA was responsible for distributing $207 million in 2024, but only $10.8 million of that went specifically to opera and theater (although some theaters did receive grants for “multidisciplinary work,” a pot of $5.6 million shared with museums and other cultural institutions). This money is shared among hundreds of companies.

Here’s a sample of some of the largest grants to theaters in 2024: Classical Theatre of Harlem ($75,000), TheaterWorks USA ($78,600), National Alliance for Musical Theatre ($95,000), the Metropolitan Opera ($75,000), and the Public Theater ($75,000). The largest single grant awarded to a theater in the second round of 2024 NEA funding was $100,000 to support Roundabout Theatre Company’s theatrical workforce development program.

That money is not given freely and must be spent on a specific production or educational program laid out in the grant application. Classic Stage Company received a grant last year for $20,000 to support its staging of Wine in the Wilderness, and having seen that beautifully designed production, I suspect that money covered a portion of the costume budget.

Off-Broadway shows routinely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce and the cost is set to rise with the unionization drive at off-Broadway theaters. It’s still a bargain compared to Broadway, where you cannot really do anything for less than $3 million. But it’s safe to say that no theater is covering the entire cost of production with their NEA grant.

While American arts-lovers frequently lament the paucity of government funding, it also means that a hostile regime cannot destroy the arts in this country simply by defunding the NEA. The loss of a $15,000 grant isn’t going to break any American theaters, which are overwhelmingly supported by box office receipts and private philanthropy. But it does add another cut to the thousands that have already been inflicted by falling ticket sales and changing donor priorities. If something doesn’t change soon, I suspect that a huge number of America’s not-for-profit theaters will shut their doors permanently in the next decade.

Can a president really destroy the NEA?

The spectacular gutting of USAID in the early weeks of this administration is a sign that it can and will end funding for the NEA if it really wants to. While funding the endowment is technically the prerogative of Congress, the Trump administration (especially working through its new “Department of Government Efficiency”) has shown an extraordinary will to tighten the purse strings on agencies it sees as hostile to its agenda (or beloved by liberals), with little resistance from the Republican-controlled legislature. The budget recommendations of the Trump White House are very likely to be copied and pasted into a future budget put forward by congressional Republicans.

Democrats are unlikely to influence the federal budget before 2027, and even if they regain power, the arts will be just one of many competing priorities. With key resignations and the Trump administration’s continued efforts to eliminate it, the NEA faces an increasingly uncertain future.

How can we fight back?

The silver lining of living in a country that is so stingy with its arts funding is that no damn philistine politician can destroy the arts so long as private citizens are willing to be patrons. Nor can the president control programming at theaters that receive no federal funding.

So, buy a full-priced ticket to a show at a not-for-profit theater. Even better, donate to that theater.

To protect themselves against the culture war volatility of national politics, America’s not-for-profit theaters should burn their NEA grant applications and produce the shows their audiences want to support through philanthropy and at the box office, without the threat of government interference.

But that can only work if you, the viewer, step up to support them.