Congress Responded to Your Advocacy to Save Cultural Arts Agencies!

The Democratically-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate have finally resolved with the President the details for the Omnibus Appropriations bill for FY’19 (4.5 months late) to avoid another partial government shutdown tomorrow. It’s expected that the President will sign the bill passed by both chambers into law by midnight tonight. As anticipated, both the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) each received a $2 increase to bring their annual budget up to $155 million. Several other federal cultural agencies and programs (see chart below) received healthy increases as well.

Congress responded to your advocacy calls, emails, and visits to save these vital cultural agencies and took it a step further by actually increasing their annual budgets by $2 million each, despite President Trump’s attempt to terminate them.  The NEA and NEH administer thousands of arts and humanities grants to state and local nonprofit cultural organizations, universities, and governmental agencies in all 50 states and U.S. Territories and 435 congressional districts across the nation.

These FY’19 appropriations levels will be in place through the federal government’s fiscal year ending September 30, 2019. On March 5th, arts advocates kick-off Arts Advocacy Day for a much larger increase for the cultural agencies FY’20 budget, beginning October 1, 2019.

Please support our ArtsVote2020 grassroots and political efforts to build an even stronger pro-arts Congress.

Nina Ozlu Tunceli
Executive Director