Killing Arts and Culture, Project 2025 Style

Russel Vought, the Senate-confirmed Director of the Office of Management and Budget and a primary author of Project 2025, plans to defund our most robust professional arts institutions like the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and, it could be argued, our most important American cultural body, the Smithsonian Institution (1).

Though Project 2025 itself makes no mention of federal funding for the arts, the Heritage Foundation, the think tank responsible for producing this policy document, has been recommending defunding the arts for almost 30 years (2). I have spent most of my life as an arts and culture worker and advocate. I keep a close eye on the arts economy, as it is, after all, my livelihood. I am well aware that Heritage Foundation conservatives have long sought to starve arts organizations of public funding.

As Executive Director of Tuolumne County Arts Alliance, I was interviewed by The Union Democrat just after the 2024 presidential election. I said then, “MAGA is not good for the arts.” Local business leaders interviewed in the same article expressed excitement in agreement with the newly elected president that the good times were finally here, with a “business genius” at the helm (3).

Through my study of art history during times of authoritarian takeovers, I have found that arts and cultural institutions are attacked very early on in the process of consolidating power in these regimes. (The capture and renaming of the Kennedy Center is a good example (4).) Reading the Project 2025 manifesto makes it clear that we are living through an anti-democratic takeover of our country (5). The arts are never safe in this kind of atmosphere, as the arts represent the essence of free speech and self-expression. To the authors of Project 2025, the arts and artists are suspiciously “woke.” Eventually, individual artists are demeaned and punished.

MAGA leadership uses Project 2025’s roadmap by creating demons to slay: Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) and woke-ism, i.e., cultural resentments against Democrats, liberals, progressives, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, women, Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, high taxes, climate change, and science. The arts in all their forms are inexorably included in this “hateful” stew.

The arts are woke-ism at its best, which makes arts and culture a target. The arts must be brought to heel for authoritarianism to be successful in fully capturing culture. Controlling the arts is, to put it crudely, MAGA marking its territory.

Here is what has already happened to squash free speech that is part of arts expression and cultural creation in theater, dance, poetry, film, music, and visual arts:

Eventual, complete defunding of the National Endowment for the Arts (6).
Cutting funding to the National Endowment for the Humanities (7).
Defunding National Public Radio as well as the Center for Public Broadcasting, which has already closed (8).
Firing the head exhibition director of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (9).

The danger of the arts is that they offer alternative perspectives that are not a part of the Project 2025 authoritarian roadmap. The White House is politicizing arts and culture and seeks to totally erase our collective history!

NOTES

1. Andrew Weinstein, “Trump’s Campaign to Defund the Arts – and Rewrite History,” Time Magazine, October 24, 2025,
2. Laurence Jarvik, Heritage Foundation Distinguished Fellow, “Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts,” April 29, 1997,
3. Guy McCarthy, “Trump Supporters in Tuolumne County Buoyed by Presidential Election Outcome,” The Union Democrat, November 6, 2024,
4. Elizabeth Blair, “Former Kennedy Center President Refutes Trump’s Critique of ‘Bad Management,’” National Public Radio, May 21, 2025,
5. “Mandate for Leadership, The Conservative Promise: Project 2025, Presidential Transition Project,” The Heritage Foundation, 2023, https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf.
6. Ryan Bourne, “End the National Endowment for the Arts: Art Can Survive and Thrive without Public Funding,” April 9, 2025, The Cato Institute,
7. Hannah Hethmon, “Trump Proposes Elimination of National Endowment for the Humanities, Jeopardizing Local Cultural Programs Nationwide,” Federation of State Humanities Councils, May 2, 2025,
8. Maya C. Miller and Cayla Mihalovich, “California’s NPR and PBS Stations Will Cut Staff and Programs after Funding Slashed,” CalMatters, July 25, 2025,
9. Jessica Gelt, “Smithsonian Museum Director Resigns Two Weeks after Trump said He Fired Her,” Los Angeles Times, June 13, 2025,