So far, arts and culture seem to be flying under President-elect Donald Trump’s radar, at least as far as campaign promises and conservative policy blueprints go. But if Trump’s first term is any indicator of what’s to come, the quiet period won’t last.
That’s because Trump is the only president to have formally proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, two of the major funding agencies for arts and culture nationwide, which he repeatedly tried to write out of the federal budget during his first term, only to be blocked by bipartisan support for both agencies in Congress.
On top of that, the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, called the endowments “wasteful” in 2020 and suggested that grants supporting arts and humanities are “better done by private contributions.”
Fiscally speaking, the NEA and NEH make up less than half a percentage point of the federal government’s overall budget — with each agency spending about $207 million in the past year. But the fight over their future is about more than penny-pinching.
Attempts to eliminate the NEA began in the 1980s under the Reagan Administration. Conservative critics of the agency worried about funding projects they considered obscene or denigrating to religion. Attacks on the agency continued into the 1990s, and in 1997 the House of Representatives pushed the NEA closer to termination than ever before, voting to dismantle the agency by a one-vote margin, but the Senate blocked the attempt, approving a five-year funding extension for the agency. Then-President Bill Clinton had also vowed to veto any spending bill that did not include NEA funding.
Those concerns still float around conservative views of the NEA and NEH, and around the arts in general. Earlier this year, for instance, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis slashed $32 million in arts and culture grants from the state budget over fears that the money might fund what he characterized as “sexual festivals,” according to the Tampa Bay Times.
So what are the NEA and the NEH? And what do they mean to Colorado?
What are the NEA and NEH?
The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, the NEA and NEH respectively, are separate federal agencies established in 1965 by the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act.
The act, and the subsequent endowment agencies, were the culmination of a movement calling for the federal government to invest in cultural activity with the same seriousness and urgency that it invested in science and technology.
Underpinning the act’s text and its Senate hearings was a concern about the implications of a technologically advanced society that lacked free and critical thinkers.
“Science and technology are providing us with the means to travel swiftly. But what course do we take?” Glenn Seaborg, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, told a Senate committee in 1965. “This is the question that no computer can answer.”
The act passed and was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. It emphasized mutual respect, and understanding a diversity of beliefs and cultural heritages as the keys to a healthy American society. And it directed the federal government to help fund those efforts.
CU Boulder, CSU Fort Collins, Colorado College in Colorado Springs, and the University of Colorado, Denver, were among the first group of grantees to receive funding from the new endowment in the summer of 1967. The four colleges used the money to fund research fellowships in history, literature, social sciences and philosophy.
Where can you find NEA and NEH money in Colorado?
Since 1998, the earliest year with consistent data for both agencies, the NEA and NEH have awarded Colorado institutions close to $130 million total, with just over $85 million coming from the NEA and $44 million from the NEH.
The NEH funds have been received by 35 cities and towns around Colorado, while NEA money has been spent in 57 cities and towns.
The NEA has funded nearly 800 projects during that time across 24 disciplines, including dance, theater, visual arts, literary arts, music, design, opera and folk and traditional arts. The amount awarded ranges from $5,000-$100,000, with the average award landing at around $20,000.
Some recent NEA-funded projects include the annual Dragon Boat Festival in Wheatridge, Día de los Muertos programming at the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center in Pueblo, a bilingual theater production for kids in Creede and writers workshops in Denver. The NEA also provides roughly one quarter of Colorado Creative Industry’s overall budget, which is distributed to federally approved state programs, such as Poetry Out Loud, and the Folk and Traditional Arts project grants.
The NEH, during that same time period, has funded close to 300 programs ranging from $500 history exhibitions at local libraries, to a $620,000 grant for History Colorado to digitize Colorado’s historic newspapers published between 1859 and 1922, as part of the National Digital Newspaper Program.
So, the short answer to where you can find NEA and NEH money in Colorado, is, pretty much anywhere you find arts, culture or Colorado history.
Where we could see gains under Trump
Despite a record of writing off the NEA and NEH, there are some areas that the incoming Trump administration might want to hold onto, according to Nina Ozlu Tunceli, executive director of the Arts Action Fund.
Some of those projects include celebrating America’s 250th anniversary in 2026, an ongoing project that the NEA and NEH are involved in and that Ozlu Tunceli said is “near and dear to the president, members of his campaign, and his supporters,” during a recent post-election webinar. (History Colorado is also working on its related America 250-Colorado 150 project).
Other cultural areas that could grow under the new administration are arts in rural regions and better access to cultural opportunities for military and veteran families, Ozlu Tunceli said.