Former Arkansas governor and two-time GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee publicly pleaded with President Trump to spare arts funding from the budget axe Wednesday.
In an op-ed titled “A conservative plea for the National Endowment of the Arts,” Huckabee urged “my president and friend to hold back from one tiny area of the budget whose elimination would cost far more than it would save.”
That area is the National Endowment of the Arts budget, which President Trump has proposed zeroing out along with the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of the “skinny budget” blueprint he suggested to Congress.
Zeroing out the NEA’s budget would amount to about $150 million in savings annually, said Huckabee in the Washington Post or “just .004 percent of the federal budget.”
Huckabee talked up the beneficiaries of that money, in his telling “kids in poverty for whom NEA programs may be their only chance to learn to play an instrument, test-drive their God-given creativity and develop a passion for those things that civilize and humanize us all.”
To justify the “conservative” part of the title, Huckabee insisted that “I truly want the government to stop wasting my tax money,” and bashed Hollywood celebrities, insisting none of this money would go to subsidize their “insufferable political whining.”
