The Trump administration’s proposed cuts to government-funded projects and departments that serve the public good are staggering. As with everything Trump and Republican, it doesn’t take much of a deep dive to see that while they’ll tell their base one thing, they’re clearly doing something else. An example would be budget director Mike Mulvaney’s insistence that they aren’t proposing cuts to Social Security, when in fact they are. The entitled-attitude of this robbery for the rich is no more transparent than in their attacks on the considerably smaller budget items like the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), who are being literally shut down by this budget. The NEH’s Deputy Chair Margaret Plympton released this statement on Tuesday.
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Today the Trump administration released its comprehensive budget for the Federal government for FY 2018. The White House has requested that Congress appropriate approximately $42 million to NEH for the orderly closure of the agency. This amount includes funds to meet matching grant offers in effect as of October 1, 2017, as well as funds to cover administrative expenses and salaries associated with the closure.
As NEH awaits Congressional action on the President’s proposed budget, the agency is continuing normal operations and will be making the next round of FY 2017 awards following the meeting of the National Council in July.
Since its creation in 1965, NEH has established a significant record of achievement through its grantmaking programs. Over these five decades, NEH has awarded more than $5.3 billion for humanities projects through more than 63,000 grants. That public investment has led to the creation of books, films, and museum exhibits, and to ensuring the preservation of significant cultural resources around the country.
NEH grants have reached every part of the country and provided humanities programs and experiences to benefit all of our citizens. Hundreds of veterans leaving the military service and beginning to pursue an education have benefited from the Warrior-Scholar program, a boot camp for success in the college classroom. Students, teachers, and historians have access to the papers of President George Washington. NEH On the Road circulates traveling versions of major exhibitions to rural towns and small cities all over the map from Greenville, South Carolina, to Red Cloud, Nebraska, and beyond. Through these projects and thousands of others, the National Endowment for the Humanities has inspired and preserved what is best in American culture.
Begun in 1965, the NEH provides funding and support in the fields of the humanities—a total of 42 million. As Vanity Fair points out, Trump’s cuts to the art and the humanities—the NEA, NEH and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—saves the US .016 of the total budget. And if you hate the arts, making these cuts is just bad for business and our economy anyway.
This issue is about much more than PBS—as worthy of protection as that organization is. With these cuts and budget shifts, NPR—also funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting—is equally imperiled. As the Huffington Post notes, “The NEH has supported the creation of 16 Pulitzer Prize-winning books and Ken Burns’s iconic documentary The Civil War.” And if cultural value isn’t something the G.O.P. is willing to consider worthy of taxpayer dollars, it’s also worth pointing out—as Huffington Post does—that the N.E.A. helped get the fledgling Sundance Film Festival started. If you want to talk about millions of dollars worth of economic stimulation, check out last year’s sales, which included awards darling Manchester by the Sea.
It’ll cost taxpayers more to shuttle Trump and his spoiled shitty family around.