Arizona Congressman Matt Salmon announced his tenth bill in a series of proposals to cut wasteful and duplicative federal spending. The latest bill would eliminate funding for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
The National Endowment for the Arts was founded by the “National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965,” which included a congressional finding that “encouragement and support of national progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts” was “primarily a matter for private and local initiative,” and that the purpose of the act was to “compliment, assist, and add to” local, state, and private programs encouraging artistic expression. In 1966, the NEA received just under three million dollars in funding.
The program was expanded in the 1970s and has received over 100 million dollars each year since 1978. In 2014, the NEA is scheduled to receive over 146 million dollars in taxpayer funding.
Salmon released a calling the NEA “an example of the U.S. taxpayer burdened by an unaccountable, private entity that receives millions in taxpayer dollars annually to provide grants for artistic expression.”
Salmon said, “There is no question that artistic expression should not be sanctioned or censored by government. At the same time, government should not compel taxpayers to subsidize works they find objectionable, such as the controversial work by Andres Serrano titled, Immersion (Piss Christ), which received $5,000 in taxpayer funds.”
“At a time when the United States is over 17 trillion dollars in debt, we should be looking to spend our money on causes and programs that unite and protect our nation,” concluded Salmon. “The National Endowment for the Arts is an agency that, at best, inserts government into the freedom of artistic expression from which it should remain carefully separated. At worst, the NEA favors certain works and excludes others, picking artistic winners and losers.”
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