The long-time issue of new, diverse artists being denied access to resources by the federal government because of unequal distribution of funds. To combat this issue in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson established the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). The NEA has historically been able to provide stable funding for all arts organizations and ensure they maintained their platforms up until the NEA budget was downsized from $143 million to $100 million by Reagan’s administration in 1982. Up until 1980, public arts funding was secure in its role of ensuring that many arts organizations received enough funding, especially those in minority and disadvantaged communities that could not be funded by private or corporate foundations. But then Ronald Reagan and his budget director, David Stockman, cut the NEA’s budget in half.

As a result, arts organizations became increasingly dependent on private funds, and systemic economic inequality became evident. Johnson had originally envisioned this program to serve “not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community” (Horwitz). However, since the NEA budget cut, the larger, conservative, and more “mainstream” organizations receive majority of the public funding while minority and community-based organizations economically struggle to continue running. To demonstrate the active inequity in public arts funding, Andy Horwitz highlights that by 2012, the US non-profit arts economy was composed of “about 40,000 arts organizations with budgets over $25,000 and another 70,000 groups with budgets less than this amount.” This funding inequity is reflective of the federal government counteracting Johnson’s original intentions for the NEA by filtering access to resources and favoring certain kinds of organizations and communities, which then had more opportunities to thrive. Despite Johnson’s original goal of creating a higher sense of community and inclusion with the NEA’s redistribution of access to arts public funding, the available funding is not reaching the minority artists and arts organizations the NEA was established to aid.