Mike Huckabee Wants Trump To Save The National Endowment For The Arts

Republican presidential candidate, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee addresses the Sunshine Summit in Orlando, Fla., Friday Nov. 13, 2015. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
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Conservatives have long targeted the National Endowment for the Arts when looking for ways to trim the federal budget, but former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) has come out in support of the endowment, arguing that it’s a crucial government program.

The former Republican presidential candidate and supporter of President Donald Trump is calling on the administration to abandon its budget blueprint proposal to eliminate the NEA.

“Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts might seem expendable — especially given how often celebrity artists insult and even threaten the president,” Huckabee wrote in an op-ed in the Washington Post published Wednesday night. “But such hateful high-dollar Hollywood and music-industry stars don’t receive anything from the NEA, and they shouldn’t.”

“I do care greatly about the real recipients of endowment funds: the 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,” he continued. “They’re the reason we should stop and recognize that this line item accounting for just 0.004 percent of the federal budget is not what’s breaking the bank.”

The former Arkansas governor argued that it’s smart to invest in the arts, noting that much of the endowment’s funding goes toward low-income communities and underserved members of the population. Funding for the NEA, he said, is “essential.”

“I truly want the government to stop wasting my tax money. To some, it may seem as though the $147.9 million allocated to the NEA in fiscal 2016 is money to be saved,” he wrote. “But to someone such as me — for whom an early interest in music and the arts became a lifeline to an education and academic success — this money is not expendable, extracurricular or extraneous. It is essential.”

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