President Trump’s planned National Garden of American Heroes is one step closer to construction, as the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has reportedly re-dedicated a portion of its funding to the president’s campaign to align arts and culture in the United States with his interpretation of patriotism.
According to a report Friday in the New York Times, the agency, which is the foremost federal funder of creative endeavors in the country, disclosed the decision in a Wednesday meeting, one week after cancelling most of its existing grant programs. Grant recipients received a “Notice of Grant Termination” that bore the signature of Michael McDonald, acting director of the N.E.H. as of March, informing them the “immediate termination” of their funding, which, the letter added, was “necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities.”
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Only days prior to receiving the notice, agency employees were reportedly told that the Department of Government Efficiency, the budget-slashing group overseen by Elon Musk, was moving to cut upwards of 80 percent of their 180-person workforce. The legality of such cuts is unclear as Congress controls the flow of funds to the humanities per the established legislative process.
The NEH was created in 1965 and has since then distributed more than $6.4 billion in funding to museums, monuments, and educational programs in all 50 states and U.S. territories, according to its website. Among the diverse projects it has supported are the publication of the accounts of Lewis and Clark, Ken Burn’s seminal 1990 documentary The Civil War, as well as the publication of several books that later won the Pulitzer Prize, including The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s co-authored biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The NEH also offers critical support for cultural organizations in states that lack an active philanthropic community or arts infrastructure; funding in such cases is allocated according to state population.
Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), the ranking minority member on the House Appropriations subcommittee that manages the endowment, said in a statement first quoted by the Times, “Let’s be clear: These grants were already awarded and use funds already appropriated by Congress on a bipartisan basis.”
Pingree added: “The notion that these terminations are justified by a sudden shift in ‘federal priorities’ is nonsense. This is ideological targeting — pure and simple. And it is happening with no input from Congress or the public.”