Last week American artists and arts organizations learned that they won’t be spared from President Trump’s attempts to reshape the federal government in his image, which has roiled agencies all over Washington, D.C., and raised several legal and constitutional alarms since his inauguration last month. A post on Truth Social, in which he asserted his plans to take over the board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and dictate its programming, was only the most glaring of signals that the president, who in his last term didn’t attend any Kennedy Center honors and gave few National Medals of Arts, has some kind of vision for the arts this time around. (A spokesman for the Kennedy Center said they’d received no communication from the White House, and that the president’s plan was in any case unprecedented, if not illegal.)

More significant are changes at the National Endowment for the Arts, which early last week announced that they’d slightly pushed back the deadlines for fiscal-year 2026 grant applications and dropped two concerning bits of news: the cancellation of Challenge America, a program designed to support smalls arts organizations in underserved and low-income communities (which recently disbursed 272 such grants in the amount of $10,000 each), and a reminder that the endowment would “encourage projects that celebrate the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity by honoring the semiquincentennial of the United States of America (America250).” Another bit of fine print in the release: The NEA would now require arts organizations to have “completed a five-year history of arts programming,” upping that requirement from three years in previous grants cycles.

That news may have sounded as if the NEA would only give grants to patriotic arts projects. But the endowment’s partnership with America250, a committee to organize celebrations of the nation’s semiquincentennial in 2026, is longstanding (the committee itself began as a bipartisan initiative in 2016), and the language seeking applications on that subject has been part of previous Grants for Arts announcements. The difference is that while America250 was only one out of 10 criteria for previous grant applications, it was the only one mentioned in last week’s press release.

Then on Friday, the full updated guidelines were posted, and they now include just four categories of encouraged subjects, all of them listed in previous years: projects about the semiquincentennial; projects that originate from or are in collaboration with historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges and universities, American Indian and Alaska Native tribes, “Hispanic-serving” institutions, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, and “organizations that support the independence of people with disabilities”; projects that “support the health and well-being of people and communities through the arts” (a major priority of the previous NEA chair, Maria Rosario Jackson, who resigned on Jan. 20); and projects that “support existing and new technology-centered creative practices across all artistic disciplines and forms, including work that explores or reflects on the impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that are consistent with valuing human artistry.”

At first glance this diminished picture—the cancellation of Challenge America, the reduction of project categories—might look sadly inevitable but better than nothing in a time of contraction across the arts field, as well as grimly familiar to those who’ve watched the NEA’s budget remain frustratingly small throughout its six-decade history. (Last year, it reached an all-time high of $207 million, up from $167 million during the first Trump Administration, despite his frequent threats to eliminate it altogether.)

But the news got much worse. On the Assurance of Compliance page—a standard list of criteria for eligibility and admonishments to follow existing laws that has long been part of the fine print included with grant applications—there is some startling new language. After listing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Americans With Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination Act, and Title IX, the page includes the following new requirements:

• The applicant will comply with all applicable Executive Orders while the award is being administered. Executive orders are posted at whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions.
• The applicant’s compliance in all respects with all applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws is material to the U.S. Government’s payment decisions for purposes of section 3729(b)(4) of title 31, United States Code, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14173, Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity, dated January 21, 2025.
• The applicant will not operate any programs promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws, in accordance with Executive Order No. 14173.
• The applicant understands that federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology, pursuant to Executive Order No. 14168, Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.

Though the language of Trump’s executive orders is often vague and tendentious, and hence likely to be challenged and/or litigated, these new guidelines would seem to mean that arts organizations that apply for NEA grants in FY 2026 will be required not only to sign on to the openly regressive agenda of the new administration to roll back progress on racial and cultural diversity and trans rights, but to discontinue any programs or efforts they have in place now along those lines. It remains to be seen how arts organizations (including TCG, our publisher, which has long received some funding from the NEA, though not under its Grants for Arts program) will respond. An NEA spokesperson said that the endowment “is continuing to review the recent executive orders and related documents to ensure compliance and provide the required reporting.” The NEA plans to host an informational webinar about these new guidelines on Feb. 18.

At presstime other current categories of NEA grants—the “creative place-making” program Our Town, Research Awards, Partnership Agreement Grants, Creative Writing, and Translation Projects—are all still listed on the NEA’s site, with some seeking applications and others pending new deadlines. All active programs include the Assurance of Compliance fine print.

The last time the NEA was in the crosshairs of the culture wars was in the 1980s and ’90s, when conservative senators, most famously Jesse Helms, put pressure on the NEA around its funding of allegedly “indecent” and “obscene” art, the vast majority of it by queer artists, leading to the end of direct funding of artists. That contretemps had its roots in the first Reagan administration: Hilton Kramer reported in The New York Times not long after Reagan’s 1980 election that the new president’s advisers were in the midst of “an important debate on the future course of Government policy on the arts,” and that their “virtually unanimous” opinion was the both the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities had been “profoundly compromised by politicization and an accompanying lowering of standards under the Carter Administration.”

Since NEA chair Jackson stepped down on Jan. 20, President Trump has not yet nominated a successor (the endowment’s senior advisor, Mary Anne Carter, remains). But as part of his order to create Task Force 250, a large-scale plan to celebrate the semiquincentennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 6, 2026, he included the chairs of both the NEA and the NEH on a list of members. The new task force will have its headquarters at the Department of Defense.

Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.