A mission renewed: The survival of the national endowment for the arts, 1981?1983

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Within a matter of days after the inauguration of Ronald Reagan as the 35th President of the United States on January 20, 1981, the budgetary implications of the new Administration burst upon the nation's capital with the force of a hurricane. (1) Rumors soon spread of a "Budget Book" being circulated among key Members of Congress on Capitol Hill which outlined a panoply of unprecedentedly severe reductions in federal expenditures to be sought by the Administration in the months ahead. Having been elected the previous November on a platform pledging a major reduction in the size of the Federal Government and a frontal attack upon massive economic problems characterized by simultaneously high inflation, interest rates and unemployment, the Reagan Administration lost no time in translating its sweeping political mandate into a program designed to truncate that portion of the federal budget devoted to discretionary domestic spending (i.e., excluding defense as well as Social Security and certain other "entitlement" programs). The ramifications of the Administration's program of radical budgetary reduction for federal cultural support quickly emerged. (2) On Sunday, February 8, arts reporter Ruth Dean, in an article appearing in The Washington Star, revealed that the Administration was recommending cuts in the budgets for the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities nearly 50 percent below the levels that had been proposed by the out-going Carter Administration several weeks earlier. Further, as Dean reported, the Reagan Administration's Office of Management and Budget, in justifying these Draconian recommendations, had invoked language which seemed to call into question the very legitimacy of federal cultural support. "Reductions of this magnitude," declared the OMB authors of the 'Budget Book1, "are premised on the notion that the Administration should completely revamp federal policy for arts and humanities support. For too long, the