The National Endowment for the Arts awarded a $25,000 grant to the New West Symphony to perform something called "The Ronald Reagan Overture." A symphony orchestra playing a patriotic composition honoring a former president at a time when America is celebrating its 250th anniversary.
NPR is furious.
Arts reporter Chloe Veltman took to "All Things Considered" on Friday to sound the alarm that Trump's NEA has shifted its grant priorities toward patriotic and pro-American material. The segment treated the development like a five-alarm cultural emergency. NPR reported that the NEA had been "too focused on diversity and inclusion" under previous administrations — her words, though she clearly didn't mean it as a compliment — and that the Trump administration had reoriented funding toward projects celebrating American heroes and American values.
The specific grants NPR found so alarming include funding for projects honoring Amelia Earhart and Roberto Clemente — the pioneering aviator who flew solo across the Atlantic and the baseball legend who died in a plane crash delivering earthquake relief supplies to Nicaragua. NPR managed to turn even Clemente into a problem, noting "the racism Clemente faced as a high-profile Puerto Rican" as though honoring the man's heroism somehow erases his struggles. The NEA's "Garden of American Heroes" initiative, which funded the New West Symphony grant, is apparently the kind of thing that keeps NPR reporters up at night.
To build her case that patriotic art is dangerous, NPR turned to David Lubin, a retired Wake Forest University professor, who warned that such projects promote a worldview of "my country, right or wrong, that America is the greatest place." Lubin argued that "patriotic art is a useful tool for governments because it unites people around policies" but cautioned that it "only ends up reinforcing rifts" and "feeds into thought patterns already prevalent among half the population."
Read that complaint carefully. Half the population thinks America is great, and the concern is that art might agree with them.
The Trump administration rescinded $21 million in NEA grants back in 2025 that had been earmarked under the prior administration's priorities. The current NEA has redirected funding toward projects that celebrate American achievement, American history, and American heroes — the kind of art that a national endowment for the arts might reasonably be expected to fund.
Not everyone in the arts community is panicking. Juan Dies, a member of the Sones De Mexico Ensemble, told NPR directly: "I don't feel like we're compromising our goals or mission. By playing the rules, we are able to give our perspective." An actual working musician, navigating the system and making art. No existential crisis required.
But the NPR segment wasn't really about grants or symphonies. It was about the fact that for decades, the NEA was a reliable pipeline for the cultural left. This is the agency that famously funded Andres Serrano's "Piss Christ" — a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine — and defended it as vital artistic expression. The same institutional voices that told Americans to respect taxpayer funding for a photograph desecrating a religious symbol are now distressed that taxpayer money might fund a symphony honoring Ronald Reagan.
The through-line is consistent. When the NEA funded art that challenged, mocked, or deconstructed American values, that was bold. When the NEA funds art that celebrates American values, that's propaganda. The word changes depending on who's holding the brush.
Professor Lubin worries that patriotic art "feeds into thought patterns already prevalent among half the population." The other way to describe thought patterns prevalent among half the population is "popular." A government arts fund producing art that half the country actually wants to see — in the 250th anniversary year of the nation's founding, no less — used to just be called doing your job.
A symphony orchestra is performing a piece honoring Reagan at a time when America is turning 250. Somewhere, "Piss Christ" is still in a museum. Only one of these keeps NPR awake.