By a vote of 297-114, the U.S. House of Representatives rejected a proposal to cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities by 15%. Variety called Wednesday's vote "a boost to arts advocates, who argued that such funding was just a tiny fraction of the federal budget yet offered an array of benefits to local communities." Congress has slightly increased the budgets for the two agencies, to about $153 million each in 2018.
Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), who had proposed the funding cut via an amendment to a larger government funding bill, said at a House Rules Committee hearing earlier this week that he "thought I would take just one little bit of this spending and kind of come down a little more on Donald Trump's side." Trump had proposed ending funding for the agencies.
The result was "a signal that the NEA has moved beyond some of the divisive battles that it experienced in the 1990s, when then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich targeted it for elimination. In Wednesday's vote, Republicans were almost evenly split on whether to cut funding," Variety wrote.
Robert Lynch, president and CEO of Americans for the Arts, said that the result was "one of the largest vote margins in support of the NEA and NEH ever, this bipartisan showing and resounding vote is a testament to the good work of the federal agencies and the power of the arts in our communities, schools, lives, and work."