After making massive cuts at the Institute for Museum and Library Sciences and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and rescinding grants awarded by those agencies, the Trump administration brought its sweeping and arbitrary DOGE-style cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) last week. The NEA sent out emails on Friday to grant recipients across the country informing them their grants had been canceled.
“We got an email about 9 p.m. on Friday night notifying us that the grant was being terminated,” Andrew Sherburne, co-founder and executive director of FilmScene, told Little Village.
FilmScene in Iowa City is the oldest and largest year-round nonprofit cinema in Iowa. Its NEA grant helped pay for FilmScene’s programs that work to build a sense of community, Sherburne explained.
“That encompasses all sorts of programming that we do,” he said. “It encompasses the two film festivals that we do, the ReFocus Film Festival and the Iowa Disability Film Festival. It encompasses our community collaboration series, as well as a lot of our other community-focused programming.”
Over the last three years, FilmScene’s annual grant from the NEA grew from $20,000 to $30,000.
“We had seen an increasing investment from the NEA, because they believe in our work,” Sherburne said. “And it’s been critical really to building these programs on an annual basis, and it seems really unlikely that we will see that money next year.”
The email FilmScene received, like the others that were sent out on Friday, said its work is no longer “prioritized by the President.” It’s the sort of nonspecific boilerplate language the Trump administration has used when terminating existing grants and other funding for humanities, science and educational organizations.
The NEA and the NEH were created by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act, which was passed by bipartisan majorities in both chambers of Congress in 1986 and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson. Both were established as independent federal agencies in order to shield them from undue political pressure from either the White House or Congress. The text of the Arts and Humanities Act lays out the importance of the work the two agencies were created to support.
“The world leadership which has come to the United States cannot rest solely upon superior power, wealth, and technology, but must be founded upon worldwide respect and admiration fo the nation’s high qualities as a leader in the realm of ideas and of the spirit,” the act states.
“Art is a nation’s most precious heritage,” President Johnson said during the signing ceremony for the act in the White House Rose Garden. “For it is in our works of art that we reveal ourselves, and to others, the inner vision which guides us as a nation.”
In the email sent out Friday, the Trump administration said, “The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.” These new priorities mandate that the NEA now “foster AI competency, empower houses of worship to serve communities, assist with disaster recovery, foster skilled trade jobs, make America healthy again,” among other things.
In response to grant cuts, a group of senior NEA officials resigned on Monday.
“Among those leaving the agency are directors overseeing grants for dance, design, folk and traditional arts, museums and visual arts, and theater,” the New York Times reported. “Also departing are the directors of arts education, multidisciplinary works and the ‘partnership’ division, which oversees work with state and local arts agencies.”
The head of the NEA’s literary arts division, along with three other members of that division, have also resigned. The NEA has had a leadership vacuum at the top since January. Maria Rosario Jackson, who was appointed chair of the NEA by President Biden, resigned when President Trump was sworn in. Trump has not nominated a new chair. The budget plan the White House released eliminates all funding for the NEA.
The NEA’s total budget in 2024 was $207 million, which amounted to 0.0003 percent of the overall 2024 federal government budget of $6.75 trillion.
Trump attempted to eliminate the NEA every year during his first term in office, but Congress rejected his efforts. The NEA provides vital support to both large and small arts organizations across the country, and funds projects in all of the country’s 435 congressional districts. Democratic members of Congress have denounced Trump’s NEA cuts. So far, no member of Iowa’s congressional delegation has said anything about the drastic funding cuts for the arts.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration eliminated an NEA program that supported projects in underserved communities, and transferred its funds to a competitive grants program for projects that embody the president’s vision of “American greatness” ahead of next year’s celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
FilmScene and other arts organizations in Iowa, like arts organizations nationwide, expected the funding cuts that happened Friday.
“We anticipated that this was probably coming down the pike, we didn’t know for certain if or when, but we had some time to think about what was likely to happen,” Ben Godar, executive director of Varsity Cinema, Des Moines’ nonprofit theater, told Little Village.
The Varsity had a $20,000 NEA grant, which helped fund the programming it does to build community, hold special screenings with featured speakers, host education programs and support local filmmakers. But according to Godar, while helpful, the NEA funding only represents a small part of the Varsity’s overall revenue.
“It’s a blow, but we’re not going to be closing the doors because of this,” he said. “I don’t want people to worry.”
He added, “We remain committed to doing the work that we’ve always been doing.”
The Des Moines Metro Opera, on the other hand, might have to cancel one of its programs because of the NEA funding cuts. The Des Moines Register reported on Monday that the cuts are endangering the future of a program that brings opera to school kids who might not otherwise have the chance to experience the art form.
“The NEA has done so much to increase accessibility to the arts,” Metro Opera Director Michael Egel told the Register. “Our Opera Iowa program touches so many rural school districts. … It’s a very sad day.”
The Des Moines Metro Opera has been awarded NEA grants for the last four decades to support its work.
One aspect of the cuts announced Friday that Godar finds particularly troubling is that they don’t apply to future grants, and are instead eliminating the funding that remains on grants that have already been awarded.
“That’s never been the way things have been done, as far as I’m aware,” he said.
The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies (NASAA) made the same point in its statement on the cancellation of the NEA grants:
Each of the NEA’s terminated grants had already passed a rigorous review process based on excellence and merit. Grantees, in turn, had already made commitments to their communities, workers and venues — promises that the federal government has now broken. NASAA fully respects that government agencies must adjust their services from time to time, to address executive or legislative goals and adapt to changing community conditions. But the abrupt termination of active grants is counterproductive.
FilmScene’s Sherburne said he finds the termination of existing grants “alarming, because it reveals [the Trump administration’s] intentions.”
“It’s pretty clear the arts are being systematically attacked and defunded,” he said.
“But we’re not going anywhere,” Sherburne continued. “We’ll find a way. With or without that NEA funding, we’re going to keep doing the programming our members and our community count on.”
“As long as people keep believing in what we do and showing up for what we do, we’ve got a future.”
