“The NEA has always been a lightning rod,” says Portland Center Stage Artistic Director Marissa Wolf. “It’s nothing new. It’s an old, old-school tactic.”

As rumors swirl that the National Endowment for the Arts may be next on the federal agency chopping block, following devastating cuts to museums, libraries and the humanities, the fight to protect arts and culture funding continues. Jeff Hawthorne from the City of Portland’s Office of Arts & Culture sent an urgent email to his public list on Friday, April 25, which read: “We’re hearing word that DOGE has made its way to the National Endowment for the Arts. A reduction in force is almost certain, and many are worried that the NEA’s grants budget will be reduced as well.” 

NEA grants work on a reimbursement system, so grant recipients have to submit an invoice to get paid. Hawthorne urged all organizations with open grants who were waiting on the rest of their funding to log in and request all of their funds right away. He also directed arts organizations to a national survey from Americans for the Arts designed to capture real-time information on how the new administration’s policies are affecting the arts and culture sector.

The past four months have been an exercise for all of us in running out of new ways to say “This is unprecedented,” but sometimes it’s still worth saying anyway: this is unprecedented. In two decades as an arts grant writer, I have never seen what amounts to a bank run on the NEA. 

At the moment I’m writing this, the DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) axe hasn’t fallen yet, and the window for it may be closing; Elon Musk’s position of “special government employee” expires after 130 days, and he’s already announced he’ll be stepping back from DOGE once that happens. It’s not at all clear whether the agency will have the wherewithal to continue such an aggressive campaign of hacking away at federal programs without him personally driving it. But from the moment the Trump administration turned its focus on the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), concern began to arise that the NEA would be next. 

Is a shutdown next for NEA?

On March 6, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Rhode Island filed a lawsuit against the NEA on behalf of Rhode Island Latino Arts (RILA), National Queer Theater (NQT), The Theater Offensive (TTO), and Theatre Communications Group (TCG), seeking to overturn the NEA’s draconian new terms of compliance with Trump’s executive orders. The specific language challenged by the lawsuit reads: “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.’”

ArtsWatch published a detailed timeline of the case to date on March 11. A temporary injunction, intended to run through the new grant deadline of April 7, would have protected grant applicants from having to promise compliance with the new terms. However, a judge lifted it on April 3, based on a promise from the NEA that they were undergoing their own internal review about how to apply the new terms, the results of which they would announce by April 30. 

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Given the current landscape, it’s impossible to avoid the suspicion that “we’ll have an answer for you in a month” is pretty much exactly what you’d say if you had reason to believe that in a month there would no longer be an NEA at all. Certainly one way to avoid having to give grants to trans and nonbinary artists is simply to stop giving grants to anybody. If you’re looking for conspiracy theory-flavored evidence that the NEA knew all along that a shutdown was coming, you don’t have to dig very deep to find it.

On March 17 – less than two weeks after the lawsuit was filed, and a full ten days before a judge was scheduled to hear the motion – Trump’s NEA appointee, Senior Advisor Mary Anne Carter, sent a memo to all NEA grantmaking staff stating that the NEA was temporarily rescinding any implementation of Executive Order 14168, and “Any prior statements the NEA has made concerning any provisions of the EO that apply to its grantmaking are null and void… To the extent that the NEA has evaluated any part of any grant applications on or since February 6, 2025 based on the EO, we are rescinding those evaluations and will reconsider those applications at the appropriate time, once the administrative process described below is complete.” 

A lot of this is immediately shady. It seems to translate to, “Okay, everyone who was throwing grants in the trash because they had something to do with trans people, take them back out again and return them to the stack.” But the grants portal didn’t even open for applicants until March 14, and the temporary injunction was put in place on March 7. That means anyone who might have been using “gender ideology” as a factor in their grant review would technically have been in violation of a court order. If Carter had reason to believe that was happening, it was her job to stop it.

The other deeply fishy part is the timing. The NEA claimed it was “initiating a new evaluation of the EO in accordance with the Administrative Procedure Act.” Allegedly, this process is meant to address how to implement EO provisions given the slew of court orders around them (this isn’t the only one being challenged in court), as well as the claims in the legal filing that the NEA would be stepping outside their lane if they tried to police arts organizations’ content for political reasons. 

The process was scheduled to finish by April 16, and to be implemented and publicized by April 30. They claim they won’t implement the EO or require anyone to certify their compliance with it before then, meaning applicants didn’t have to sign off on it to apply by the April 7 deadline. But that’s effectively meaningless, since these grants won’t be awarded until next January. That’s plenty of time to decide they’ve changed their minds and actually do plan to enforce it while they’re going through the pile and scoring them.

What should give everyone pause is this line: “This direction should not be understood to impair the authority of the NEA to award, fund, terminate, or cancel grants at any stage in the grant lifecycle for reasons unrelated to the EO, consistent with applicable law.”

At first glance, sure. You’re filing a legal document specific to one criteria for grants, and you want to make sure it’s clear that the court isn’t empowered to weigh in on any other criteria. But at second glance, and coming hard on the heels of brutal cuts to so many other agencies, it’s a huge red flag for Carter to remind us she has the authority to cancel grants altogether for all kinds of other reasons this judge can’t do anything about.

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Where things stand today

So… can artists apply to the NEA in this round with projects that affirm equity for marginalized communities? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe it’s impossible to say. I don’t feel any more clarity on this topic than I did a month ago when the lawsuit was first filed. 

More importantly, neither do grant recipients. Organizations who were awarded funding in December, like Milagro and Profile Theatre, are still waiting to find out if the money will turn up.

Profile’s grant of $35,000, which is intended to support their annual Playwright Convening in June, was pitched before they’d selected their writers for the upcoming season.The grant was approved with a shortlist of five, which included a number of diverse voices likely to run afoul of the NEA’s new prohibitions on gender identity and equity work. When I spoke with Artistic Director Josh Hecht on March 7, the grant had been approved, and was in the midst of the usual lengthy and cumbersome series of final compliance checks. He describes this as “like certifying the Electoral College,” in that there’s never really any actual hiccups, just a process of documenting that all the T’s have been crossed and I’s dotted to move the money along. Usually that happens in February for grants in this cycle, which he’d factored into his budget timing for the festival. By early March, they were tracking behind the usual schedule, but not by much. Hecht pointed out that under any other president he’d consider the delay negligible; given changes at the NEA, however, it gave him a bad feeling.

A month and a half later, he’s still in limbo. On April 22, he sent an email to Ian-Julian Williams, the NEA’s Theater & Musical Theater Specialist, which read: “Any updates on if or when we might expect our grant to move from ‘offer’ to ‘awarded?’ We’re now less than two months out from the project. The NEA is 50% of the funding for hard costs we need to lay out imminently for the project to move forward. Without it, the project is in real jeopardy of being canceled. Any info on the cause of the delay, and most importantly, when we can expect to be able to request funds, would be greatly appreciated.”

Williams responded with one line: “No additional updates to share, unfortunately, and I apologize considering our support is a major factor in considering whether your project can go forward.”

The frustrating vagueness of this response may be a result of confusion behind the scenes about how the NEA is interpreting the court’s orders. Senior District Judge William E. Smith of the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island heard the motion for an injunction on March 27, and the Rhode Island Current has an excellent recap of it here (you can also watch the whole two-hour proceedings on YouTube). The plaintiffs were represented by Vera Eidelman and Scarlet Kim, both senior staff attorneys at the ACLU, while Rhode Island Assistant District Attorney Kevin M. Bolan provided the NEA’s defense. Ultimately, while the judge did say he believed the NEA had overstepped by trying to force grant applicants to swear to Trump’s EO language, and that they had likely violated the First Amendment in doing so, he ultimately decided that the temporary injunction should be lifted so it didn’t interfere with the NEA’s internal evaluation process as they decided what to do next. 

I am not a lawyer, but I did read all the legal documents so you don’t have to, and the core of the argument centers around the legal principle of “voluntary cessation.” Alexander Castro of the Rhode Island Current summarizes it as “when a defendant stops doing something – usually the something that prompted litigation – but without any promise the misbehavior will not resume in the future.” The NEA did remove the checkbox from grant applications, so you could submit your application without swearing to disavow trans people; but they never promised they wouldn’t retroactively go back in and throw out grant applications in which trans people were involved. In short, the NEA’s argument seems to translate to “Guys, this is silly, we don’t need to be here, we already fixed the thing you were worried about,” while the ACLU’s counterargument is “yeah, but we have no reason to believe you won’t do it again.” 

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Judge Smith’s decision to lift the injunction seems to let the NEA off the hook, granting them free rein to decide how to implement the executive orders unimpeded by a court order, even though the whole point of taking legal action was a reasonable belief that their decision-making process couldn’t be trusted without a court order ensuring it was fair. 

Again, it’s hard to remove the broader context from this; kicking the can down the road for over a month feels like a pretty good way to get the courts off your back while buying time for DOGE to circle the wagons. For better or worse, we’ll know more by the end of this week.