For Immediate Release May 5, 2011

Contact:  Leslie K. Paige 202-467-5334 Luke Gelber 202-467-5318

CAGW Issues Spending Cut Alert: National Endowment for The Arts

(Washington, D.C.) – Today, Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW) issued its weekly spending cut alert aimed at eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). NEA was formed in 1965 to underwrite the arts. Eliminating its funding, which is among the spending reductions advocated in CAGW’s Prime Cuts database, would save taxpayers $165 million in one year and $825 million over five years.

Advocates of reducing the size and scope of NEA are not limited to fiscal conservatives. The sitting Chairman of the NEA, Rocco Landesman, stated at a conference at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage on January 27, 2011, that his organization’s funding has contributed to a surplus in theatres, a significant percentage of which are in the red. In 2008, 41 percent of all non-profit arts groups were operating at a loss. In essence, Landesman believes that the NEA has created “too many theaters.” Four days later, on the NEA’s official blog, he also decried bloat in the arts bureaucracies, when he wrote: “There are 5.7 million arts workers in this country and two million artists. Do we need three administrators for every artist?” John Chait, a self-described progressive, explained in February, 2011 on The New Republic website, that “Even if your goal is universal access to art, you don't want the NEA, you want art vouchers for the needy. But that would put the government in the cruelly paternalistic position of requiring the poor to spend money on a symphony instead of food.”

Putting NEA funding on the table in any discussion of spending cuts has always been difficult; it provokes an emotional response from interest groups and NEA beneficiaries, which often have high profiles and easy access to the media (some of which, like National Public Radio and PBS, are themselves sustained with federal funds). When House Republicans proposed cuts to the NEA in March of 2011, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) protested, citing his state’s “Cowboy Poetry Festival” as an essential cultural event in desperate need of federal backing. Sesame Street’s Big Bird is a regular fixture at press events decrying reductions to NEA’s funding.

“Americans treasure the arts, in all its permutations. They can, and do, support them generously, through donations and patronage,” said CAGW President Tom Schatz. “But taxpayers should not be robbing bus drivers and plumbers to pay strapped actors and photographers. Markets, not government, can and should decide Americans’ appropriate level of arts consumption. Art thrived before the advent of the NEA and it will thrive after the NEA.”

Citizens Against Government Waste is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to eliminating waste, fraud, mismanagement and abuse in government. The Spending Cut of the Week calls attention to a federal program that is wasteful or duplicative.