Nea Fights For Its Life House Panel Reduces Funding To Amount Needed For Shutdown

Survival is the name of the game at the National Endowment for the Arts, the battered mouse of federal agencies, now about to engage in its most critical battle with the Republican conservatives who want to squeeze it out of existence.

“It’s got nothing to do with the arts or what we do. It’s got everything to do with politics,” said Jane Alexander, who has been chairman of the NEA for four years.

Both Alexander and NEA opponent Patrick Trueman of the American Family Association were at a recent gospel breakfast on Capitol Hill at which the Myles Family Singers, a Mississippi group helped by the NEA, sang, “There is no need to stand up for the right unless you stand up against the wrong.”

Demonstrating the depth of AFA’s opposition to the NEA, Trueman reacted by saying the lyrics merely reflected his group’s determination to eliminate the arts agency.

The family lobby contends the NEA continues to fund “pornographic” films. Alexander repudiated the charge, but admitted she had no hope of putting an end to the criticism by conservative foes.

“Without us, who’s their scapegoat?” she asked.

In the latest encounter between the NEA and AFA, Alexander asserted that the conservative group had “a long record of distributing purposefully inaccurate information about the NEA.”

“The fact is that this agency has made more than 112,000 grants over its 32-year history and fewer than 40 have caused some people some problems. That is a record of excellence that any private business or government agency would envy,” Alexander wrote to members of Congress.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors voted last week to call for congressional funding of the NEA at the $137 million level requested by President Clinton. But the House Appropriations Committee slashed its $99.5 million budget to $10 million, the amount it would need to shut down.

Opposition to the NEA has been a rallying cry for Republicans since their 1994 takeover over Congress. House Majority Leader Richard Armey has denounced the agency as “an affront to the taxpayer,” asserting that the framers of the Constitution said nothing about financing the arts.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently sharpened his attack by suggesting that wealthy celebrities who seek federal arts funding should set up a private fund by dedicating 1 percent of their own income.

In 1995, Republicans agreed that the NEA would not be funded after fiscal 1997. A 40 percent cut in the NEA budget left it with less than $100 million for all expenses, with $90 million scheduled to support about 1,000 grants, a sharp drop from the 3,600 grants of two years ago. According to Alexander, any more cutbacks will be “disastrous.”

Underlining White House support for the agency, first lady Hillary Clinton said recently that the kind of money authorized by Congress was “totally inadequate, if not embarrassing … and will result in decreased support from the private sector.”

She said that when the White House was burned by British troops, what Dolley Madison rushed to save was “not the books of accounts, but a portrait of our first president, something that meant more than anything else to the idea of freedom and liberty.”

A debate on the future of the NEA is scheduled on the House floor in July, but the agency’s chief hope of survival depends on the Senate, where it retains a support base.

In the protracted fight over the NEA, battle lines are drawn between those who argue that the federal government has a responsibility to support the arts and those who contend that grassroots arts groups should seek funding from the private sector.

Trueman, the family group leader, said, “Our continuing objection to the agency is that despite all that has happened, the myth that the NEA has been cleaned up is not true.”

He said he stood by charges that the NEA was still “funding pornography year after year” and cited publications by a group called FC2 that included “graphic descriptions of a wide variety of sexual acts.

Rep. Stephen Horn, R-Calif., acknowledged that the NEA had made its “share of mistakes” but suggested eliminating the NEA “would send a signal to the business community and the American people that the arts are not valued by the nation’s leaders.”

He said the arts should be considered as essential to both culture and economic well-being of communities.