Shut Up, Artists, Money’s Talking

On May 2nd, mere hours after President Trump proposed eliminating the US National Endowment for the Arts, emails began arriving to arts programmes large and small across the United States. “The NEA is updating its grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation’s rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President,” the email explained. “Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside of these new priorities.” Since that day, all arts organizations who received that email have had their federal grants revoked or terminated, as part of the administration’s efforts to drive out “woke” culture from the United States. Organizations report losing over $27 million in NEA grants so far.

While these cuts represent a massive blow to cultural institutions across the US, they are not just a fiscal decision. The administration has already announced plans to reallocate portions of the rescinded NEA budget to support the creation of a new “National Garden of American Heroes” — a sprawling monument park featuring statues of select historical figures, carefully curated to reflect a vision of American greatness rooted in traditionalism and nationalism. This garden, pitched by Trump as a “reminder of the real America,” stands in stark contrast to the broad, diverse, and inclusive programming once supported by the NEA — from minority-focused arts residencies to community theatre in immigrant neighborhoods.

Arts budgets are being slashed across the globe, sending arts organizations running to rapidly depleting private donations and fundraising streams for survival. From government overstretching to governmental overreach, the reasons for this crisis are varied and, at times, fundamentally terrifying. As creators and communities face this hardship, the greater impacts reverberate farther and longer than we may be able to anticipate.

The 2025 Freemuse State of Artistic Freedom Report accounts for yet another year of increasing censorship around the globe, with governmental oppression beyond borders and growing risk to life and liberty for many artists for creating, protesting, and existing. While many face physical danger, others, particularly in democracies, now face financial silencing. Their grants are gone, their donors cautious, their viability evaporating.

In the US, a growing anxiety over simply keeping the lights on threatens not just the existence of these projects, but what Svetlana Mintcheva describes as a larger “erosion” of free expression, driven not by direct suppression but by pressure to self-censor for survival. In her report for Freemuse, Mintcheva notes that cultural institutions caught in the political crossfire often choose not to support controversial work out of fear of donor loss or public scrutiny. “Museum neutrality becomes less convincing,” she writes, “when institutions censor the expression of exhibiting artists — or single out specific works and frame them with prejudicial warning labels — all in the service of maintaining their neutrality.”  A recent survey commissioned by the Artists At Risk Connection and, the Association of Art Museum Directors, and PEN America showed that even before the 2024 US election, nearly half of art museum directors surveyed had felt pressure to remove or censor “potentially offensive or controversial” art. 90 percent of museums noted that they did not have any formal policies in place to respond to such pressure, making them vulnerable to censorial decisions when facing challenges and social scrutiny.

This troubling trend — censorship by anxiety, not decree — is gaining traction even in supposedly “free” societies. While funding has always been a tool of influence, the scale and intent behind today’s shifts mark a dangerous new era. In the U.S., Trump’s redirection of arts funds toward a nationalist monument is not just symbolic; it’s strategic. By gutting diverse cultural programming and replacing it with a state-sanctioned pantheon of “approved” American heroes, the government is not just defunding culture — it is defining it.

While many were rightly appalled to have their funding stripped, they were not surprised. The latest wave of cuts follows similar actions against the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the National Science Foundation (NSF). These independent agencies have long been targets for Trump’s ideological crusade. Their defunding was initially floated during his first term, but is now fully embedded in the 2026 federal budget request, where the arts and sciences are explicitly labeled as “woke” threats to national identity.

The United States has historically leaned on private philanthropy to fill the gaps in public arts funding — a system that is itself fraught with inequities. But as public funds are pulled along ideological lines, private donors grow increasingly skittish. Cultural institutions now operate under the double burden of pleasing bureaucrats and placating wealthy funders, all while trying to retain artistic integrity.

Even in the UK, public arts funding is becoming entangled in political and bureaucratic pressures. A decade of gradual cuts, austerity measures, inflation and cost-of-living crisis have pushed many arts organizations to the edge. Some, like Wigmore Hall, have declined public funding altogether, citing the Arts Council’s increasingly restrictive reporting requirements. Earlier this year, the Council attempted to introduce a new funding clause discouraging “political” art — a move that echoes recent NEA policies and drew sharp criticism for undermining artistic freedom. The result: British artists, too, are adjusting their work to stay fundable, rather than free.

Government funding for the arts depends on a tangle of factors — economic, political, cultural — and is often a target of abuse during moments of moral panic. What used to be isolated skirmishes — controversies over individual pieces labeled “obscene” or “blasphemous” — have become coordinated campaigns that frame fiscal austerity as neutral policy, while actively reshaping cultural expression.

In Berlin, the left-wing cultural center Oyoun was forced to close after the Senate cut its public funding. The decision followed the center’s refusal to cancel an event hosted by “Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East,” a group Berlin officials deemed unacceptable due to its support of the BDS movement. Despite being a Jewish-led group, Berlin authorities cited a 2019 Bundestag resolution labeling BDS as antisemitic, and pulled Oyoun’s funding. The center’s statement captured the chilling effect this decision will have: “It resembles the setting of a precedent that all state-funded institutions may now fear. The implications are far-reaching, impacting the very essence of artistic freedom and expression.”

Meanwhile, in Argentina, President Javier Milei’s government has launched an attack not just on the present of cultural programming, but on history itself. Milei has stripped funding from historical museums and art centers memorializing Argentina’s dictatorship-era atrocities. The ESMA Museum and Site of Memory, a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Buenos Aires, is feared to be next. Already, the government forced the closure of a prominent cultural center, The Conti, after they were coerced into laying off 50 of its 87 employees. Remaining institutions have been warned not to use terms like “Memory, Truth, and Justice” in their programming.

Across the globe, we see a pattern. In the UK, it’s the slow drip of austerity and compliance. In the U.S., overt ideological warfare. In Germany, single-minded chilling of alternate narratives. In Argentina, historical revisionism. Different methods, same result.

We are witnessing how financial power is being used not just to support culture, but to shape it — to silence dissent, erase histories, and reward ideological alignment. Funding is no longer neutral; it is political. And as public dollars disappear or get weaponized, those with “uncomfortable” stories or marginalized identities find themselves shut out, starved of platforms and support.