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When Donald Trump became the first president to make a formal proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, the future looked grim to the many artists and cultural organizations that have long worried about conservative efforts to close the federal arts-funding agency.
But the nightmare they feared never came to pass. The agency survived, its budget even grew a bit, not because President Trump ever wavered in his view of it as a waste of federal dollars, but because Congress, whose role as the president’s nemesis has only grown in recent days, voted to keep it alive.
And the legislative support was bipartisan because the agency had spent years cultivating supporters on both sides of the aisle.
“The years and years of work that we had done to create a pro-arts Congress, whether Republican or Democrat, really came through,” said Nina Ozlu Tunceli, executive director of the Americans for the Arts Action Fund. “Congress became a firewall to prevent that termination from happening.”
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