‘A cloud of uncertainty’: Nebraska arts and culture institutions navigating fallout of federal funding cuts

Dave Marsh stepped up onto the flatbed trailer that would serve as his stage. The gig: an Independence Day celebration near Crawford in Nebraska’s far northwest corner, far from his home outside of Lincoln.

Despite the distance, the scene felt familiar. 

The longtime musician has spent the past 30 years traversing the state to educate audiences about his eclectic arsenal of instruments, which includes the accordion and the guitar but also the hammered dulcimer and bodhran, among many others. He estimates he has introduced hundreds of Nebraska kids to folk music during that time.

“A lot of these kids don’t know what a banjo is,” said Marsh, who also plays banjo. “And a lot of the other instruments that I play are things that they just don’t see.”

But that musical mission could be in jeopardy. Humanities Nebraska, which financially supports Marsh’s work and hundreds of similar programs that reach tens of thousands of Nebraskans each year, is among at least a dozen cultural institutions in the state facing financial uncertainty in the wake of federal funding cuts by the Trump administration earlier this year.

In Nebraska, the new administration revoked a grant to boost First Friday art walks in Benson, cut money to help low-income children access music education in Omaha and Lincoln, slashed support for the Crane River Theater Company in Kearney and threatened to blow a hole through the budget of the Nebraska Crossroads Music Festival in Lincoln and Omaha. And it cut nearly half a million dollars from Humanities Nebraska.

“I’ve never seen anything close to a moment like this,” said Chris Sommerich, the organization’s longtime executive director.

In some cases, private donors have stepped in to mitigate the damage, and some organizations still managed to spend their grant money by acting quickly. Many arts leaders say conditions are better here than in other states, citing the safety net provided by the Nebraska Cultural Endowment, a trust that generates over $1 million annually for arts and humanities programs.

But it’s hard to fully replace public funding. Even the most generous private supporters of the arts don’t have bottomless pockets, and as a result, the cuts have created an atmosphere of uncertainty, even for organizations that haven’t yet lost federal dollars.

Fran Sillau, executive artistic director of Omaha’s Circle Theatre, said he initially assumed the theater’s $10,000 grant to support an inclusive production of “The Wizard of Oz” wasn’t coming. So that’s what he told others, including the press. But after months of waiting, the theater finally received the money on Aug. 6.

“We’ve got today covered. What about tomorrow, or a year from now?” Sillau said. “This is more uncertain for us than the pandemic.”

New funding priorities

For many arts organizations, the ominous email arrived on a Friday night in early May. 

“The NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) 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,” read the email. “Consequently, we are terminating awards that fall outside these new priorities.”

Translation? Your work is no longer worth funding.

“When we received that, immediately we thought, ‘Man, that’s going to hurt financially,’” said Steve Barth, executive artistic director of the Crane River Theater Company in Kearney. “But also it’s hard not to ever take that personally and feel like, ‘Wow, so what we’re doing is no longer as important.’”

Barth, who grew up in Kearney, co-founded the Crane River Theater Company in 2009 alongside two childhood friends. Along with shows, the theater provides programs for kids, and that educational work — as well as its location in central Nebraska, where theatrical offerings are less common than in Omaha and Lincoln — made the theater an ideal candidate for NEA grants. For the past seven years, the theater has secured almost every grant it applied for, Barth said.

So the email announcing that the theater was losing this year’s $10,000 grant was a huge blow. On top of that, it arrived just weeks before the start of their summer season. Artists and performers were already contracted, season tickets had already been sold.

“At that point, it was kind of hard to cancel anything,” Barth said. “Nor did we want to.”

Media reports and a survey conducted by Nebraskans for the Arts suggest that at least a dozen organizations in Nebraska received a similar notice from the NEA that their funding was being terminated, including BFF Omaha, the Great Plains Theatre Commons, WhyArts, Lincoln’s Symphony Orchestra, and others.

It’s not always clear why individual grants were revoked. The NEA included in its email to grant recipients a list of the new administration’s funding priorities, including projects that will “celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence,” “foster AI competency” and “make America healthy again.”

“It didn’t seem like there was any rhyme or reason. It just happened and we were forced to deal with it,” said Neidy Hess, communications and grants manager for the Omaha Conservatory of Music. “Instead of asking questions, they just did the cut first.”

Among the funds that were slashed: money to help low-income kids access music education.

The NEA canceled a $10,000 grant to the Lincoln Music Teachers Association that would have been used to expand the organization’s existing music outreach program, which provides free and reduced-cost music instruction and instruments. While the organization hasn’t had to cut back, its president, Lindsay Bartlett, said she worries about the trickle-down effects.

“If a student were to be interested in this program — and we were to then not have the financial capacity — well, would they want to come to it in the future?” she said. “Music lessons are not an affordable, cost-effective thing.”

A race to spend money

Not all the money vanished for good. Some organizations that lost NEA grants were still reimbursed for funds spent before May 31.

The Omaha Conservatory of Music was one.

Hess said the organization managed to spend the $25,000 it received this year to support its music education program, String Sprouts, by the deadline. But this is a grant that, until now, the conservatory has received for over a decade, and the uncertainty over whether they will ever get the money again has forced them to pare back the program. They have had to reduce the number of host sites and will be closing the program’s Scottsbluff location next year.

“That instability has now caused us to think, OK, so then how much more of our program are we going to need to cut?’” Hess said.

Another was the Nebraska Crossroads Music Festival.

In January, the festival was awarded $40,000 — a big deal for a young organization with a budget of just over $300,000. But on May 2, the NEA’s email arrived. The funding was being terminated, and the festival had until the end of the month to use it.

The following day was supposed to be a proud one, executive director Olga Smola wrote in a post on the festival’s website. On May 3, the festival announced its 2025 schedule, a lineup of 12 free musical events in Lincoln and Omaha. But it was also the start of a race to spend as much of the money as possible: buying artists’ airline tickets earlier, renegotiating with vendors and looking for other sources of money.

“The process added some significant complications for us, especially for a small organization like ours,” Smola said. “All of that was very uncertain, and the uncertainty also had ripple effects.”

Some private donors, unsure about how the loss of the grant would affect the festival, stepped back, Smola said. Others shifted their focus to support statewide organizations that were also hurting, like Humanities Nebraska.

Ultimately, the show did go on. When Smola stepped on stage at the festival’s Lincoln Showcase in late July, she still thanked the NEA for its generosity. But the experience was stressful for the organization’s small staff.

“We had to work much harder, doubling our efforts in both fundraising and production to keep the festival on track,” Smola said.

An uncertain future

As of Aug. 4, the Crane River Theater Company hadn’t received any of its promised grant funding. But the theater has found ways to fill the gap for now.

In the wake of the cuts, Barth posted the news on social media and asked for community support. The theater set up a GoFundMe, which has raised over $13,000. That plus other private donations helped offset both the federal cuts and an unrelated funding crunch that hit the theater soon after.

But this isn’t a permanent solution, Barth said.

“If that funding from the National Endowment for the Arts or from government grants stops for future years, how often can I count on these businesses and these individual donors to keep stepping up?” he said.

Other organizations are struggling with similar questions.

Sommerich, of Humanities Nebraska, said a combination of money from the Nebraska Cultural Endowment, private donors, state funding and an emergency grant from the Mellon Foundation has offset the cuts. He’s also cautiously optimistic that Congress will earmark more funding for the arts and humanities.

Still, nothing is certain, and the Trump administration has signaled that it wants to eliminate both the NEA and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“None of us are counting on any federal money next year,” Sommerich said, referring to other state humanities councils across the country. “We can’t budget for something that has such a cloud of uncertainty over it.”

Marsh, the musician who travels on behalf of Humanities Nebraska, is still performing. But now he tells audiences that the funding for his programs is at risk and that he hopes they still will support the arts when it’s gone. He said a few people have told him something like: “Maybe after they get rid of all this waste and fraud, hopefully they’ll add things like this back.”

It’s a sign that people believe his music is a reasonable thing to pay for, Marsh said. But there’s still a disconnect that’s difficult to overcome. 

For example: Earlier this year, the newspaper in Burwell covered one of Marsh’s performances, giving his music a glowing front-page review. But right above the story was an editorial cartoon praising billionaire Elon Musk, then the leader of Trump’s cost-cutting efforts, for putting an end to the “gravy train” of federal funding.

Marsh said audiences don’t have to pay for his music, so they’re not aware that they’re losing anything.

“It’s kind of taken for granted,” he said.