By Debra Cash

Abolishing cultural infrastructure and the deregulation of emerging technologies are two sides of the same anti-intellectual coin.

“Art is inclusive. It brings people together, like tonight. Art looks for truth, art embraces diversity, and that’s why art is a threat  —  that’s why we are a threat — to autocrats and fascists.”

Robert De Niro, speaking at the Cannes Film Festival, May 13, 2025:

In 2001, Grover Norquist, founder and president of the conservative advocacy organization Americans for Tax Reform said that his Reaganite Republican supporters intended to reduce the size of the U.S. government by half in 25 years “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”

Norquist’s schedule was — appallingly — right on the money.

One of the people Norquist said this to was a reporter for National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. No one who has been paying attention for the past quarter century – not to mention since the publication of the unequivocal Republican party wish list outlined in Project 2025 – should be surprised that NPR and its parent the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are now facing the Trump-Elon Musk chainsaw. As are the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). All are reeling from the rescinding of existing grants and threats to their existence under the pretexts that they support terrorism, antisemitism, and “woke” liberalism. Add to that coercive threats to universities; the cancellation of Obama- and Biden-era student debt relief programs and Pell grants that support college tuition; the firing of the well-regarded Librarian of Congress and Register of Copyrights; Trump installing himself as Chair of the Board of the Kennedy Center; and his Executive Order to eliminate the Department of Education altogether.

America’s cultural infrastructure is being unraveled.

Claims of efficiency and tax savings are laughable.  For instance, in 2022, the NEA’s $207 million budget was 0.003% of the total federal budget, and for many years, a favorite talking point among cultural professionals was that military marching bands enjoyed a bigger appropriation than the NEA, a nonpartisan agency supporting the arts and, especially, arts education in all 50 states. At the same time, as Americans for the Arts notes, at 4.2% of America’s GDP — $1.2 trillion – arts and culture as a sector outperform transportation, construction, education, and agriculture.

Long before Trump stepped into the Oval Office, arts advocates had recognized that the American arts funding landscape was inadequate and unsustainable. That doesn’t mean we didn’t appreciate anything the local, state, and federal governments could provide, or that the behind-the-scenes work of nonprofit and commercial arts organizations wasn’t crucial. But the arts’ – and artists’ –survival in a market economy was never assured, even with dollops of philanthropic underwriting.

Some art makes money, don’t get me wrong. But more typically, arts activity – and the enjoyment and edification experienced by the public – doesn’t cover its costs. It is subsidized by the artists’ unpaid and unremunerated labor.

This has led analysts to ponder a number of initiatives. Maybe we could emulate Harry Hopkins’ New Deal WPA, employing artists directly for the common good. The WPA employed artists to paint murals in public buildings, present performances in what we would now call underserved areas, and document vanishing folkways. (New York seems to have taken the WPA as its model when it created a City Artists Corps during COVID to keep artists working and the community enriched by their efforts.) There could be Percent for Art linkage programs linked to hotel occupancy, real estate development, or special events. Cities and states could establish special income tax funds for arts and culture efforts. There could be targeted public/private partnerships drawing on the largesse of locally-based corporations.

But many of these ideas have been a hard sell. In part, this is because they seem to privilege artists over other types of insecure gig and low-income workers. And as food banks are running out of money at exactly the moment when Republicans in Congress are ready to cut off SNAP benefits, it’s hard to feel bad for well-educated, if underemployed, violinists, actors, and painters who may be hungry, too.

But what do we lose when the federal government cuts the arts off at the knees by eliminating support entirely?  Depending on where you stand, there are many arguments for why the American people should invest in arts and culture—the people who make them and the organizations that sustain them—through a modest percentage of their taxes as well as through personal patronage.

Music, the visual arts, theatre, dance, film, and literature—and artistic practices and disciplines that combine them in often unexpected ways—offer opportunities for people to pay attention to transporting beauty and to look without flinching at destruction and horror. They offer critique and conciliation. The arts can go small and intimate, providing space for the articulation and reflection of individual interiority. And they can embrace multitudes, proposing and celebrating the character of communal identity. They can shine a light on the past and present or offer a vision of the future, and sometime both at once.

Imagination creates shared spaces.

That makes the arts very, very dangerous to authoritarians. Historians including Timothy Snyder and M. Gessen have described how Trumpism has imposed an overt rejection of critical, independent thinking.  It denies that we share common spaces and can empathize with others’ experiences. And not at all coincidentally, Trumpism asserts that everything, including civic culture, must be transactional.

Yet we can connect the dots.  Abolishing America’s cultural infrastructure and the deregulation of emerging technologies are two sides of the same anti-intellectual coin.

After Trump fired Carla Hayden, the first woman and first Black American to lead the Library of Congress, by email on May 8, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained her dismissal by saying “there were concerning things she had done at the Library of Congress in the pursuit of D.E.I. and putting inappropriate books in the library for children.”

Hayden had indeed been adding BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) material to the library’s collections through the “Of the People: Widening the Path” initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation (and good for her for doing so), but the second clause of Leavitt’s comment is flat-out ignorant. The Library of Congress is the copyright repository of every print or digital book published in the United States. Furthermore, users have to be 16 to do research there. Kids don’t check out books from the Library of Congress. Besides, as known to the defiant library staff who called the Capitol cops on the replacement appointees when they tried to enter the building, the Library of Congress isn’t subject to Executive authority. That’s why it’s the Library of a Different Branch of Government.

But two days after Hayden was dismissed, the firing of Shira Perlmutter, the Register of Copyrights and Director at the U.S. Copyright Office, gave away the game. Perlmutter had just released a report that called for the licensing of intellectual property on which generative AI systems are trained. “Making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries,” the report said.

This assessment frustrates Musk’s apparent belief that he and his tech bros should be able to rip off other people’s intellectual property with impunity—that cultural contributions can be commodified to enrich him instead of, perhaps, their rightful creators.

Strangulation from below (eliminating America’s cultural infrastructure) combined with strangulation from above (giving a free pass to AI and emerging technologies that mimic and might replace human cultural production) will choke the arts and humanities in the United States. Nefarious actors will be able to harvest them for private gain before the broader society recognizes the cost.

There are many ways to push back.

For artists and writers:

• If you are an artist whose federal grant has been rescinded, understand your rights
• If you live in Massachusetts and your NEH, IMLS and/or NEA grant was rescinded or withdrawn, fill out a MASSCreative survey before May 23 so that advocates can share your stories of harm and hardship
• If you are a writer and want to license your work to AI companies or prevent unlicensed use of your work, the Authors Guild has partnered with Created by Humans to share best practices and build a response

For everyone:

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Debra Cash is a Founding Contributing Writer to the Arts Fuse and a member of its Board. She is a lifelong arts professional and a “power user” of her local public library. In full disclosure, she is a member of the Author’s Guild and has worked with nonprofit members of MASSCreative.