President’s FY20 Budget Calls for Termination of Cultural Agencies Again

By Brooke Nuckles, 421 contributed posts
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Americans for the Arts
- Arts Action Fund

March 18, 2019

Dear Arts Advocate,

For a third-straight year, the Trump administration has proposed to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the Corporation of Public Broadcasting (CPB). As misdirected as this proposal is, we are confident that Congress—as it has done in the past two fiscal years—will again reject this short-sighted budget request in a bipartisan, bicameral manner, and increase funding for the Endowments.

Will you contact your member of Congress today to urge them to reject the president’s proposal?

In the past two years, Congress not only dismissed these initial calls for termination, but in fact gave steady increases in funding to several cultural agencies. Check out a brief history of budgetary proposals and final funding for these agencies for the past three years below:

Key Federally Funded Arts Agency	President Trump’s FY 2018 Budget Proposal	Final FY 2018 Funding	President Trump’s FY 2019 Budget Proposal	Final FY 2019 Funding	President Trump’s FY 2020 Budget Proposal
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)	Termination	$152.80 million	Termination	$155 million	Termination
National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)	Termination	$152.80 million	Termination	$155 million	Termination
Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS)	Termination	$240 million	Termination	$242 million	Termination
Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB)	Termination	$445 million	Termination	$445 million	Termination

Be sure to check out Americans for the Arts and Arts Action Fund President and CEO Robert L. Lynch’s full statement regarding the president’s budget proposal. We also hope that you’ll consider contributing to our 2019 campaign to save these cultural agencies from termination.

Thank you,

Nina Ozlu Tunceli
Executive Director