THE NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS is OURS TO SAVE
by Montserrat Mendez 5/13/2025
FRIENDS, ARTISTS, BELIEVERS IN BEAUTY AND TRUTH
The blade has fallen. The NEA! our National Endowment for the Arts, that stubborn flicker of light in the long American night has been dismantled before our eyes.
Active grants? Slashed. Future funding? Erased in the FY26 budget like an afterthought, like a mistake.
This is not fiscal responsibility. This is vandalism.
And we, you, are the only ones who can stop it.
THEY WANT YOU TO THINK THIS IS SMALL. IT IS NOT.
The NEA’s entire budget is 0.004% of federal spending, less than the cost of a postage stamp per citizen. And yet, with that almost laughable sum:
It reaches 678 counties that philanthropy abandons.
It leverages millions more in state and private funding because federal art dollars don’t replace investment, they invite it.
It serves schoolchildren, veterans, elders, rural towns, city streets; the stories that would otherwise go untold.
This is not a luxury. This is infrastructure. The infrastructure of empathy, of memory, of resistance.
Do not be fooled by the smokescreen.
While the NEA has changed its parameters this year to include other initiatives than your own, supporting HBCUs, celebrating America's 250th anniversary, assisting disaster recovery, these are nothing more than fig leaves covering a brutal truth: Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation's blueprint for authoritarian rule, explicitly calls for the NEA's elimination. And now, like clockwork, the Trump administration's FY26 budget proposes doing exactly that; not just defunding, but terminating the NEA entirely, along with its sister institution, the NEH. Senior officials have already resigned in protest as active grants are slashed midstream. This is not fiscal responsibility. This is an act of cultural arson.
WHO PAYS THE PRICE?
Not the wealthy. Not the urban elite. The rural. The isolated. The communities that don’t have galleries or donors or billionaires. The ones who depend on that NEA grant to keep the local theater alive, the after-school poetry workshop running, the tribal elders’ songs recorded before they’re lost forever.
They are counting on you to fight for them.
WHAT YOU MUST DO—RIGHT NOW:
CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES. Not an email. Not a tweet. A call. Say: "Restore the NEA’s funding. Honor the bipartisan legacy of the Arts Endowment. Do not let American culture bleed out in silence."
TELL THEM THE NUMBERS. 0.004%. 62 cents. 678 counties. Make them say those words out loud.
GATHER YOUR PEOPLE. A church basement, a theater lobby, a living room. Read a poem. Sing a song. Then call together. KEEP CREATING.
THIS IS HOW WE WIN. Not with whispers. With noise. With the kind of stubborn, messy, inconvenient love that art demands of us.
They think we’ll let this go. Prove them wrong.
Art is dangerous. Art is a mirror held up to power, and authoritarian regimes, whether nakedly tyrannical or cloaked in democratic decay, cannot bear what it reflects back to them. They fear the playwright whose words unmask their hypocrisy. They tremble before the painter whose brushstrokes expose their violence. They hate the musician whose chords stir the people toward something like hope, or memory, or rage. And so, they build machines to crush it.
What we are witnessing now, the gutting of the NEA, the slow suffocation of public arts funding, is not an accident of fiscal policy. It is the quiet implementation of an old and brutal playbook. Authoritarians do not come for the arts first. They come for the journalists, the dissidents, the marginalized. But they always come for the artists eventually, because art is the immune system of democracy. It remembers what the state tries to erase. It speaks what the powerful try to silence.
THE TOOLS OF REPRESSION ARE BEING TESTED HERE, NOW Look closely at the tactics unfolding in this assault on the NEA, and you will see the same methods used by despots and dictators, only softer, slower, dressed in the language of "budget cuts" rather than jackboots:
ECONOMIC SUPPRESSION The defunding of the NEA is not about saving money. It is about starving dissent. When a government cuts off funding for the arts, it does not eliminate art, it simply ensures that only the wealthy, the connected, the obedient can afford to make it. This is how you kill a culture without firing a shot: you make art a luxury rather than a right.
CULTURAL ERASURE The NEA does not just fund galleries and operas. It funds rural theaters, Indigenous storytelling, community murals, the voices that corporate philanthropy ignores. To kill the NEA is to erase these voices from the national story, to flatten American culture into something monochrome and marketable. Authoritarians do not burn books all at once. They shut down libraries slowly, by degrees.
INSTITUTIONAL CONTROL A government that hates the arts will always seek to replace independent creation with propaganda. Defund the NEA, and what rises in its place? Corporate-sponsored spectacle. Jingoistic pageantry. Art that does not challenge, does not question, does not disturb. This is the goal: not to end art, but to neuter it.
INTIMIDATION THROUGH UNCERTAINTY When grants disappear overnight, when artists are forced to beg for scraps, the message is clear: Your work is disposable. Your voice is conditional. This is how censorship works in the 21st century, not with a ban, but with a paycheck withheld. Not with a prison cell, but with a rent bill you can’t pay.
WHY THEY FEAR US Because art is not decoration. It is not a diversion. It is the way a people tells itself the truth. When a government attacks the arts, it is because it is afraid of that truth. Afraid of the stories that might unravel its narratives. Afraid of the empathy that might soften its cruelty. Afraid, above all, of the collective imagination, because imagination is the first step toward change.
We fight. Not with despair, but with stubborn, radiant defiance. We call our representatives. We march. We write. We make art in the streets, in the schools, in the places they have tried to abandon. We refuse to let them decide who gets to speak.
The NEA is not just a line item in a budget. It is a covenant; a promise that this country's culture belongs to all of us, not just the powerful. To surrender it now is to surrender something essential, something sacred.
They want us to believe this is inevitable. It is not.
They want us to believe we are powerless. We are not.
We are artists. We are citizens. And we will not be erased.
