During the Presidential campaign of 2012, Republican nominee Mitt Romney said he would want to do away with government support for the arts and PBS. The public response to his comment led me to write this back then. When yesterday I saw a presumably endangered Big Bird featured in the Washington Post in the wake of Trump saying similar things, I read this column over and found it still applies.
Once again a serious question about the proper relationship of the government to American art is being reduced to a flippant caricature, this time pitting Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney against none other than Big Bird. In the first presidential debate last week Romney said that as a cost cutting measure he would seek to eliminate the government subsidy to PBS, the agency that brings you, among other things, Sesame Street. Romney framed his position by saying that he wouldn’t keep spending money that we have to borrow from China on things that are not necessities.
Almost immediately bloggers pounced, predicting that the image of Big Bird in the unemployment line would be enough to hand the election to the incumbent. If the Obama campaign is smart, enthused a writer for the Washington Post, the President “could leverage Big Bird.” Within days, Big Bird had appeared on Saturday Night Live, and who knows how many parents have imbued their righteous anger into their 5-year-olds, setting them against the man who would do away with Ernie, Bert, and the whole crew.
Largely lost in this typical dust-up is Romney’s similar intention to discontinue the National Endowment for the Arts, but in the absence of salacious controversy the public doesn’t pay too much attention to the NEA. The Endowment has already been tightening its belt significantly over the past few years: in fiscal year 2012 the Endowment had an appropriation of $146 million, down from $155 million in 2011 and $167 million in 2010. The arts advocacy groups—bolstered by various celebrities—that have resisted this downward slide can only look with envy on the rash of publicity that Big Bird is generating for PBS.
Even though throughout the years it has always been the flashy controversies over lewd, blasphemous, or otherwise distasteful art connected to government funds that have thrust the NEA into the headlines, in reality it has been a clinical budget-cutting impulse that has been the regular challenge to the agency, almost from its beginnings in 1965.
Ronald Reagan was actually the first President who sought to trim the NEA’s budget, which by 1980 had risen to $156 million. All the previous attempts had come from Congress. He and his team, led by an energetic young budget-cutter named David Stockman, wanted the Endowment to make do with only $88 million, but many in Congress made it clear that they had no intention of going along with such a radical cut. Reagan soon formed the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities hoping it could find ways to increase private support for the arts in America, the idea being that perhaps government money could then be trimmed if that were to happen.
By the time Reagan left office in 1989 the NEA’s budget was $169 million, $13 million higher than when he came in. Former Metropolitan Museum curator Henry Geldzahler, who had served on the President’s Committee, mused that it must be very frustrating to be President if you can’t even cut spending on the arts.
Defenders of the Endowment today are correct when they point out what a miniscule part of the overall national budget the NEA is, and that completely zeroing out the NEA’s funding wouldn’t even make a scratch in the deficit. Moreover, since its turnaround under the presidency of George W. Bush, the Endowment has been relatively popular in Congress among both Republicans and Democrats alike. Even if Romney is elected and sends a budget to Congress cutting out the NEA, the House and Senate will almost certainly rescue it, even if with a reduced budget.
This originally appeared in the Waco Tribune-Herald on October 11, 2012