The proposed spending legislation from President Trump and the Republican administration awaiting a final vote by the United States Senate today includes $40 million “for the procurement of statues” for the National Garden of American Heroes.
Page 820 of the “Big Beautiful Bill” states that the $40 million in funds for the statues “appropriated to the National Endowment for the Humanities for fiscal year 2025″ are “to remain available through fiscal year 2028,” under Executive Order 13934, Executive Order 13978, and Executive Order 14189.
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The national sculpture garden is one of the president’s central priorities for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence next year, and was first announced in an executive order during Trump’s first term in 2021.
The National Garden of Heroes will feature life-size statues of “250 great individuals from America’s past who have contributed to our cultural, scientific, economic, and political heritage,” according to an April news release from the NEH. The garden is intended to “create a public space where Americans can gather to learn about and honor American heroes,” the release stated.
Selected artists will receive awards of up to $200,000 per statue, which must be made of marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass.
The New York Times also previously reported that President Trump “directed that subjects be depicted in a “realistic” manner, with no modernist or abstract designs allowed.”
Executive Order 13978 included a list of 244 potential names, including historical figures like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Alexander Graham Bell, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Sacagawea, and the Wright Brothers, alongside figures such as Kobe Bryant, Julia Child, Alex Trebek, and Hannah Arendt.
Photographer Ansel Adams, painter John Singer Sargent, architect Frank Lloyd Wright, painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell, early American portraitist Charles Wilson Peale, and Carnegie Museum of Art founder Andrew Carnegie are also on the list.
The legislation has been criticized for its disproportionate tax benefits for the richest Americans, large cuts to Medicaid and SNAP, $45 billion in increased funding for immigration and customs enforcement, changes to clean energy tax credits, gutting the Internal Revenue Service and other policy changes would add $3.3 trillion to the deficit over a decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
As previously reported in ARTnews, the planned sculpture garden will be funded by federal grants initially distributed to arts and cultural groups across the US, but canceled by the Trump administration. These included the NEH Fellowships and Awards for Faculty, worth $60,000.
It’s also worth noting that for the fiscal year 2025, the total budget for the NEA was $210.1 million and for the NEH it was $200.1 million, according to the Arts Action Fund, a nonprofit national arts advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C.
The news of the $40 million in funds for the statues was first reported by Talking Points Memo.