Regarding the Cuts to the NEA
On Friday evening, we were notified that our 2025 grant funding from the National Endowment for the Arts had been revoked, in accordance with the Trump administration’s new funding priorities. This news came a few hours after the administration announced their intentions to eliminate the NEA in its entirety.
We’re not delusional; we’d been preparing for the loss of NEA support in 2026 and beyond. But to lose money that we’d been tentatively awarded in November of 2024 was genuinely surprising. Our organization is small enough that some months we operate with week-to-week budget forecasting– checking our accounts, balancing our books, making sure every check and dollar comes in so we can pay every bill. For our federal government, $30,000 amounts to nothing but an ephemeral sort of budget dust. For us, it amounts to the elimination of entire programs.
In the first 110 days of the Trump Administration’s second term, we’ve lost over $230,000 in federal funding. Our annual general operating budget usually hovers around $650,000, so this loss amounts to a staggering loss of 36% of our budget. For many peer arts organizations across the nation, this revocation of funding amounts to theft. NEA funding works on a reimbursement basis; you have to spend the money to get it back. Which means that organizations who’d already started their projects have essentially had money taken from their wallet.
To quantify all of the wasted labor is to add insult to injury. Kate’s time writing the grant, that of our colleagues who reviewed and edited it, and the labor of peer evaluators selected from arts organizations across the country who reviewed hundreds of pages of submissions. Not to mention the NEA staff, who worked for months to organize these committees, select grants, send notifications and assist organizations through the acceptance process.
The elimination of NEA grant funding, which makes up a mere .003% of the annual federal budget, has nothing to do with fiscal responsibility. This is made even more evident by the Trump administration’s concurrent efforts to plan a birthday parade, which–– according to recent reports–– could range in cost from $42-90 million. It does not escape us that parades are cultural activities, but we digress.
We aren’t the only ones harmed by these cuts. Arts & cultural organizations are the heartbeat of communities, connecting people through creativity and civic engagement. We have soft power–– we aren’t the muscle of the economy, but the connective tissue of our communities. Our work is hard to trace because it’s broadly taken for granted–– but we know that the cities with arts & cultural infrastructure have stronger economies, more tourism, higher job creation and more local revenue generation. We create wealth and keep it local, while keeping young folks in our communities and sustaining more vital and diverse economies.
For this reason, it’s no surprise that the National Endowment for the Arts, which supports arts organizations in every single state, has been placed on the chopping block. It’s spaces like ours that connect people to their autonomy and agency and it’s apparent that the Trump administration considers these rights an existential threat. The communities that think, build and dream together remain vital and intact. Which is why we all have to keep going and showing up alongside our cultural and civic institutions.
So what now?
Moving forward, we’re going to keep cobbling together what we can and find creative ways to sustain through the Trump administration’s incoherent and chaotic campaign against civic life. Since we posted about the cuts late Friday evening, 46 people have donated about $2,250–– with most donations ranging from $5.00 to $250.00. This is incredibly touching to us. We know that most people in our community are scrapping it together to survive daily and that a $5.00 donation means a great deal.
Keep your eyes peeled for a fundraiser in the future–– maybe another dance party? Live concert? We hope to see you filling our space (which, incidentally, was built during the depression and has a sturdy foundation to this day) very soon.
If want to read more about the cuts to the NEA, check out this article. If you’re curious about the other organizations facing the loss of their NEA funding, you can follow this document.
Thank you for your love - onward & upward!
Kate, Ashley, KB & Barry