National Endowment for the Arts Issues Edicts on DEI

According to the new guidelines, grant recipients may not promote DEI, nor use federal funds for any program that promotes "gender ideology"

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has made significant changes to its regulations around federal grant applications — stating that grant recipients may not "operate any programs promoting 'diversity, equity, and inclusion' (DEI)."

Further, the organization's updated guidelines make clear that "federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology."

This comes just as the NEA announced it would disestablish the Challenge America grant program, which was to award a total of $2.8 million in small grants to underserved groups. The NEA said it would re-allocate that funding to projects focused on the upcoming 250th anniversary of American independence.

Similar to the Trump administration's other edicts, this development is leaving arts groups confused as to how they can best comply with the law; a seperate NYT report stated that Black Girls Dance, a Chicago-based nonprofit that trains and mentors young dancers, recently received a $10,000 grant to help finance an annual holiday show called Mary — but now the company does not know if it can legally receive the grant.

According to NPR, hundreds of artists have signed an open letter to the NEA in protest of the policy change. The letter argues that the updates run in contradiction to "the Endowment's mission to 'foster and sustain an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States'."

"Trump and his enablers may use doublespeak to claim that support for artists of color amounts to 'discrimination' and that funding the work of trans and women artists promotes 'gender ideology' (whatever that is)," said the writer and theater director Annie Dorsen, who organized the open letter. "But we know better: the arts are for and represent everybody. We can't give that up."