Oregon arts organizations scrambling after National Endowment for the Arts grants are withdrawn

The National Endowment for the Arts has withdrawn more than half a million dollars worth of grants that arts organizations all over Oregon were relying on. Portland Playhouse got a letter that said it would not get $25,000 meant for its production of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” that was to open the next day. Other organizations that saw their funding pulled include All Classical Radio, Oregon Children’s Theatre, NW Children’s Theatre, Passinart: A Theatre Company, and Profile Theatre. Portland Playhouse donors quickly made up the theatre’s lost $25,000 grant, but future federal funding is looking bleak to many Oregon arts organizations. Many of them met this week with Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, who vowed to do everything in her power to get federal funding restored.

Claire Willett is a Portland-based playwright, artist and grant writer. She’s been following the NEA funding cuts for Oregon ArtsWatch and joins us to share the latest developments.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Portland Playhouse recently got a letter from the National Endowment for the Arts saying it would not get $25,000 meant for a production that was opening the very next day. The arts nonprofit is far from alone. The list of organizations in Oregon whose promised federal funding was cut abruptly includes All Classical Radio, Oregon Children’s Theater, NW Children’s Theater, Passinart: A Theatre Company, and Profile Theatre.

Claire Willett is a Portland-based grant writer and playwright. She’s been covering the NEA funding cuts for Oregon ArtsWatch and joins us now. It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.

Claire Willett: Hi, thank you for having me.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for the scale of federal arts funding cuts just in Oregon?

Willett: Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s important to understand that the grants that were canceled come in two different categories. There was a round that was announced in December, everyone had received their “congratulations, you’re about to get your money awards.” And these grants come in, you have to invoice for them. So people were kind of getting ready to submit their invoices, get the money, and they were told their grants were “withdrawn.” And they had no recourse except to appeal and explain if they fit the new Trumpian guidelines. That was 27 organizations, over half a million dollars. And ArtsWatch has been trying to contact everyone, track down how many of those dollars are really gone. And it’s about $445,000, just from who we’ve heard from.

And then separately, folks who applied for grants that were confirmed, already in process in 2023 and 2024, who maybe had even already had part of it paid out, they were told their grants were “terminated.” So some of them were given until the end of this month to scramble to spend the remainder of the money on their budget so they could invoice for it, and that’s another, again just from what’s come to us, $200,000. So we think it’s going to be well over $700,000, maybe $800,000 when all told. And that’s just Oregon. It’s like $25 million nationwide.

Miller: So just to be clear, this is money that was already promised. People had submitted grant proposals, they were accepted, they said “congratulations, you’re going to get this money to do this work.”

Willett: Yeah, the agreements had already been made, even the batch that was just announced, the January/February round. It’s a process where … somebody described it to me as like certifying the electoral college. There’s one final review step where the batch of grants goes to a national council and they sort of rubber stamp it all. It’s all rumor and conjecture, nobody knows, but it sounds like that step didn’t happen. So the letter they got, which was framed in a really insulting way, described them all as “your preliminary agreement,” making it sound like, “we didn’t really have a commitment with you.” But they absolutely did, because the process works like this all the time.

So everyone has budgeted for this money, made plans for this money, they’ve begun the work that this money was supposed to fund. And now it was just snatched out from under them. It’s horrifying.

Miller: Am I right that the way many of these grants work is essentially as reimbursement?

Willett: Yes. So you do the work. They’re often paid out in installments, either once you have spent the money or you’re getting ready to spend the money. And the grants have a two-year period. So folks like Third Angle New Music, for example – which was the first letter that came to me – were awarded a grant in 2023 for a program that just happened. So they were gearing up to send in their invoice, start paying artists, spending the money. And they got the letter when they were in the midst of all of that happening.

Miller: So a lot of work has already been done with the promise that the feds would be paying for it. But now, in many cases, there’s no money for the work that they’ve already done?

Willett: And the grants were significantly delayed. Usually, the timing of the cycle, if you were in the batch that we’re all announced in December, you’d be able to start getting money in the door by like February. So Portland Playhouse, for example, who got the letter the night before their show opened, had every reason to expect that money would be in the bank when they needed it, based on the timeline of how these grants have been working since as long as any of us have been in this business writing NEA grants.

Miller: Are there obvious patterns in the grants that have been canceled? Are some productions, organizations or styles of work more likely to be targeted?

Willett: So it’s hard to say. Of the withdrawn grants, the pattern is, it’s almost everybody. There’s I think five folks we haven’t heard from yet. Of the folks we have heard from, there were two creative writing fellows from Oregon, they got funded. It’s possible that individual artist grants work on a different financial system, I don’t know. And then one theater company, Corrib Theatre, whose production happened quite early – I think it ran February through March – they managed to get theirs in the bank before they needed it.

I think, from what we’ve been hearing … Like Jeff Hawthorne from the City of Portland Arts office, he emailed everybody a few weeks ago before the letters started coming out, saying they were hearing they’re going to start terminating grants. If you have an open grant, get your invoices in now. So I think that there have, quietly behind the scenes, been heroic efforts on the part of NEA staff to try to scramble to get everyone their money, before the walls closed in. That’s the only reason I can think of for why one theater company among 20 other theater companies got their funding, because their show happened before the letters and stuff came out.

But other than that, we don’t have enough data on the terminated grants, the much bigger list of things from ‘23 and ‘24. It seems to be a lot of theater companies. It was theater companies that led the ACLU lawsuit against the NEA, and so there was a part of me that was sort of like is that …

Miller: Retribution?

Willett: Yeah. And I don’t know, that’s purely speculation, we can’t prove that. But certainly a lot of new work by new playwrights, playwrights of color, a lot of very progressive theater companies, we’re seeing a lot of that. But it’s everyone. The High Desert Museum had a grant canceled, the Bend Creative Conference. It’s statewide. It’s far beyond just Portland.

Miller: What recourse do these organizations have?

Willett: A couple of folks – Portland Playhouse is one, Profile Theater is another one – are running their own emergency short-term campaigns. I think, for folks who need the money right now because the production is happening, there’s been a groundswell of real support from the community. In some ways, I think that’s a double-edged sword if everyone does it. If Oregon loses $700,000 of federal arts funding, and all of that is made up by donors, then don’t the conservatives who wanted to throw the NEA in the trash get to say, “well, then they didn’t really need federal money?”

Miller: Essentially, that has been their argument, the DOGE argument, the Trump administration: If you like X program that we cut so much, why don’t you, or the state, or nonprofit, or rich person, you can fund it. And if it can, it’ll prove that there is popular support for it, everybody wins. And we have more money for whatever – a tax cut, or Pentagon spending, or whatever. What’s your response?

Willett: I fundamentally reject the premise of that question. We hear it all the time. The fact is that we would have enough money for all of the things that we wanted to do by making changes that they don’t want to make, like taxing billionaires and making defense cuts. Pitting the arts against Medicaid or cancer research is a very common, “make them fight amongst themselves so they don’t have the real conversation” sort of tactic.

But I think the piece that gets left out of this all the time that I find so frustrating, from folks who don’t really understand how the arts industry works, is what we’re really talking about here is jobs. The single biggest expense in any of these arts project budgets is paying people to do work. In the performing arts in particular, but in almost any art project, unless it’s some highly technical visual art installation or something, with materials or design equipment that’s super complicated, for most any other thing, any other grant that was in this stack, the biggest expense in that budget is paying artists.

It gets left out of the conversation around the government supporting people to make a living wage and do their jobs, because the people driving those conversations don’t necessarily think being an artist is a real job, or is a job that is worth the government supporting the infrastructure around it. But the consequence of this $25 million or more nationwide NEA budget cuts is people losing work.

Miller: But there is a difference there. Yeah, that’s the result of it. But do you mount a defense for the arts themselves? Because there are other kinds of jobs that the government does not directly support in this way.

Willett: The question of, is the arts in a civilized society something that the government should be supporting, is an opinion question. I think there are people who just simply believe that it’s not and I don’t know how to persuade those people.

I believe that it is because I feel like the arts are an integral part of just being a human being, dating all the way back to storytelling around the fire and cave paintings. I think that certainly in other countries that aren’t the U.S., subsidizing the health of arts organizations because of what they put into communities … They’re enormous economic drivers. They have health and wellness benefits in communities. They have demonstrated benefits in terms of arts access for youth in schools. They contribute to the fabric of a society in ways that feel like exactly the kind of thing the government should be funding.

But that conversation is complicated by the fact that there are people who think of it as like a luxury item, it’s dessert, it’s a thing you do on the evenings and weekends. So not only is it not worth the government paying to ensure that these small businesses that contribute to their community are healthy, but they don’t really believe that you should be making a living doing it.

Miller: I want to look forward now. Because what we’ve been talking about so far is the cancellation of already approved grants. But as I mentioned, you’re a grant writer. For years, you’ve helped organizations apply for and get funding.

I talked recently to somebody who has a lot of experience with the BLM and the Forest Service, and has gotten federal grants in the past to do forest resiliency work. And in the past, he’s used words like “climate change” as part of grant applications. He basically told me that he thinks there might be a way to more or less get money for similar kinds of projects if he tweaks the way he talks about those projects, and de-emphasizes words like “climate” and “change.”

Is there, do you think, an analog for arts funding? Would you, as a grant writer, use different words to describe the work that your clients are doing?

Willett: We talked about this a little bit with the appeals, because the condition around the appeals was basically, “Here’s the Trump administration’s new arts priorities. Prove to us that your work fits into one of those.” And some things I think it did quite easily. One of them was “Make America Healthy Again.” And like I said, there are reams of studies about the health and wellness impacts of arts programming.

Miller: Make America Healthy Again is an arts category right now?

Willett: Yeah, the letters contained a list of the Trump administration’s new priorities for NEA funding. There was like two categories of things. One was clearly like a, so we don’t get sued for discrimination, it was like, “art led by HBCUs,” “art serving Asian American communities.” But they’ve rejected grants that fit those things, so I don’t take that seriously. And then the rest were things like, “making D.C. safe and beautiful again.” They were fundamentally unserious, many of them.

Going forward, I’m assuming that is the rubric to which all grants will be held. I have one grant client who has a pending NEA grant that we submitted last summer that they’re supposed to be announcing in the batch that comes out this summer, and we haven’t gotten any information from anybody on whether that’s being applied to grants that they’re already sitting on. I’m assuming that it will.

But I don’t know. I think I’m of two minds about it, and a lot of folks I’ve talked to feel the same way, where there is sort of a camp, mostly organizations that are that are larger that can afford to, saying on principle, “I refuse to take money from the NEA while these are the conditions.” There’s another camp, which I think, like what you were saying about BLM – which I think also has great merit to it – which is, “we’re going to continue doing the work that we are doing and we’re going to re-language it in some way to fit it into your guidelines.”

Miller: Claire Willett, thanks very much.

Willett: Thank you.

Miller: Claire Willett is a Portland-based grant writer and playwright.

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