Rep. Matt Salmon has introduced a bill to eliminate duplicative National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) translations of works written in foreign languages as part of his 2016 Shrink our Spending Initiative. Since at least since 1998, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has issued Literature Fellowship Grants for “the translation of specific works of prose, poetry, or drama from other languages into English”.
Since 1998, the NEA has issued $3,537,500 worth of grant funds for this purpose. These grants are unnecessary as private publishers pay translators to do such work already. In many cases, grants were issued to translate works that have already been translated into English.
Salmon stated, “Countless publishers and academics work to translate foreign language works of literature into English, using private sector funding that correlates with the demand and interests of the American people. These publishers and academics have been undertaking such translations even before the creation of the NEA. In fact, Amazon has pledged $10 million across five years for works in translation, while the NEA has spent a little over $3 million across 18 years. Why, then, are American taxpayers funding literary translations when the private sector investment is so great? That’s the question that led to this bill’s introduction. On top of that, many of the NEA-funded translations went to works that were previously translated. Should our children and grandchildren be put further into debt so that the NEA can pay thousands of dollars for the translation of a book already available in English? I don’t think so.”
In 2014, Rep. Salmon began a program to identify and cut wasteful spending government-wide, because he knew every federal department, office, and agency has wasteful spending within their budgets. The program was called the “Shrink Our Spending” Initiative and aimed at finding $ 1.5 billion in wasteful spending. In 2015, the initiative identified and cut over $3 billion in government waste.