President Trump, as part of his agenda to reduce wasteful government spending, is setting his sights on the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. That’s all to the good, as there’s no constitutional justification for either, and they should be defunded completely.
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President Trump proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the budget he released Friday, taking aim once again at two agencies that he had tried and failed to get rid of during his first term.
If Congress defunds these organizations, of course, that will make things a lot more certain. And there are any number of smaller government-funded horse squeeze that can and should be defunded into the bargain:
The endowments, along with the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, were among the entities listed in a section titled “small agency eliminations” in his budget blueprint for the next fiscal year. The document said that the proposal was “consistent with the president’s efforts to decrease the size of the federal government to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary governmental entities” and noted that Mr. Trump’s past budget proposals had “also supported these eliminations.”
Maybe he’ll have better luck this time.
See Also: Essex Files: Trump Slashes PBS Funds, Targets Liberal Bias in Taxpayer-Backed Media
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There are, as I am continually writing, 37 trillion good reasons for defunding and eliminating these wasteful operations. A nation facing an existential fiscal crisis can’t afford to keep funding things like crucifixes in a jar of urine. The fact that local governments feel the need to finance public art is bad enough. A quick look around the city of Denver’s parks and the airport, for example, will quickly make one realize that Denver will give an art contract to any lunatic with astigmatism and an arc welder.
But at the federal level? There can be no justification for a department that has this as its purpose:
The arts endowment, established in 1965, is a federal agency that distributes grants to arts organizations and state arts agencies across the country. Its budget was $207 million in 2024, and its financial report that year said it had provided more than $163 million in grants.
$207 million, the advocates for this corral litter will claim, is only a tiny portion of the overall picture of federal spending, to which the proper reply is, “Yes, and?” That’s an utterly ridiculous argument; a nation in debt to the tune of 37 trillion and still rising can’t afford to go after the budget with a scalpel. We have to go after the federal budget with a broadaxe, and we need to take more than one whack at that budget.
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This, of course, is the best reason to defund and eliminate these organizations:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Applying this founding principle alone would eliminate a lot of the wasteful spending that Washington does now, including the taxpayer money needlessly chucked into the National Endowment for the Arts.
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