Last week, President Trump announced his proposed budget for the 2019 fiscal year, calling for deep cuts to public arts and media funding.
In addition to essentially eliminating the Institute of Museum and Library Services and slashing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s budget to $15 million from $445 million, Mr. Trump wants funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities reduced by almost 80 percent.
These cuts would spell the end of the agencies. That is the point. Mr. Trump wants them to “begin shutting down.”
This isn’t the first time the national endowments have come under fire from the right since their creation in 1965. In the late 1980s, Senator Jesse Helms led a crusade against the arts agency for funding “obscene” art like Andres Serrano’s photo of a crucifix in urine.
As the times have changed, so, too, has the right’s rationale. Now, the issue for conservatives is that the agencies are just another example of federal bloat in need of a starvation diet. The TV pundit Tucker Carlson, supporting Mr. Trump’s proposed cuts last year, called the arts spending “welfare for rich, liberal elites.”
