NEA Mulls Restructuring Plan; It’s No Fallback, Chairman Says

Top officials of the National Endowment for the Arts have been directed by the agency’s chairman to evaluate ways the beleaguered NEA could be restructured in what may be an attempt to begin to develop a political strategy to foil reorganization imposed by Congress.

But NEA Chairman John E. Frohnmayer denied Wednesday that the deliberations amount to a fallback position in the arts endowment’s persistent political difficulties in Congress, where the agency is battling for renewal of its legislative mandate for another five years.

Publicly, the endowment has remained committed to a legislative proposal by President Bush that would renew the NEA’s legal mandate with no change in its fundamental organizational structure, the distribution of its money between the federal agency and state arts councils and with no limitation on the kinds of artworks the NEA can support.

“It’s really quite the opposite” of a fallback plan, Frohnmayer said of the new internal reorganization discussions in a telephone interview Wednesday. “Lots of people are doing some very public thinking about the arts endowment. What I told them (top NEA program officials) is that we ought to look at this as an opportunity to rethink what it is we are doing.

“The charge I gave them was to assume that you have been delegated the task to create an arts endowment and there isn’t one now. What would you do, given the structure of state and local arts agencies that are out there now and the makeup of individual artists and artist organizations?”

Though Frohnmayer characterized the process as simply a part of an ongoing management strategy to try to improve the NEA, sources in the agency and outside observers familiar with the situation said a broad impression has developed that the effort is an attempt by Frohnmayer to quietly develop a restructuring plan internally before one is mandated by Congress.

The deliberations so far have involved at least one meeting convened by Frohnmayer of all endowment employees and a series of conferences at which Frohnmayer presided last week with directors of the NEA’s major divisions. Recognition that the NEA must reorganize from within or face mandatory restructuring would acknowledge what many observers believe may be the reality--that the endowment’s political base has been so badly eroded in the 14-month controversy over the kind of art it supports that reauthorization without major structural change is no longer politically possible.

At least two meetings were called last week by Frohnmayer with directors of NEA program divisions in dance, music, visual arts, museums, literature and other media.

Another meeting was scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, Frohnmayer said. Under discussion, sources familiar with the talks said, are restructuring details at least somewhat comparable to provisions in an initiative by House Republicans who have proposed that the NEA be carved up so that 60% of its money is channeled directly to state arts councils. The plan also would change the NEA so it gave out no grants of less than $50,000--a provision that would eliminate the entire federal program of fellowship grants to artists, dancers, musicians and writers.

“There is no question that (Frohnmayer) is very frustrated by the idea that we have too many grants and too few staff to manage them,” said one NEA official familiar with the deliberations. “He would like to have program directors come up with ways to reduce that kind of load.”

Sources familiar with the discussions insisted that, specifically, the NEA program directors had been urged to comment on the implications for the federal arts agency of establishing a minimum grant level. These sources said response by the program directors had been uniformly negative and that at least one of the meetings last week ended with Frohnmayer furious with the program directors over their refusal to embrace the reorganization concept.

“These people have never been asked to do that before,” said a source familiar with the meetings.

“I think that there is some very understandable reluctance to change what one is doing,” said Frohnmayer, “and that is going to be true in any kind of situation where people have worked here for a long time and are committed to what they’re doing. I think it’s a very healthy exercise.”

The issue of minimum grant levels and the division of NEA money with state arts councils is especially sensitive because proposals to do just that are included in a controversial Republican alternative plan for NEA reauthorization floated two weeks ago by Reps. Tom Coleman (R-Mo.) and Steve Gunderson (R-Wis.). Under the Coleman-Gunderson proposal, state arts councils would receive 60% of all NEA funds in direct block grants and the smallest NEA grant would be set at $50,000.

The Coleman-Gunderson plan was introduced after a breakaway arts group, the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, unveiled a nearly identical proposal of its own. The move was interpreted as an attempt to grab a larger share of available NEA money for a special interest constituency and, at an unprecedented summit meeting of arts groups in Washington last week, the proposal was abandoned by the national assembly.

The summit was convened by Rep. Pat Williams (D-Mont.), chairman of the House NEA reauthorization subcommittee. Williams has scheduled a hearing for next week on a bill he intends to draft based on recommendations from the arts summit.

Last year, according to the NEA, 87.5% of all of the agency’s 3,900 grants were for less than $50,000--with many in the $1,000 to $2,000 range to support specific projects by individual artists in rural or obscure settings that make it difficult for them to get funding through traditional supply-demand forces in the arts marketplace.

Though Frohnmayer characterized the reorganization discussions as a logical part of the NEA’s internal management process, one member of the agency’s 26-member advisory board reacted with surprise and alarm to reports of Frohnmayer’s initiative. “It’s shocking to me,” said Harvey Lichtenstein, president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music and an influential member of the National Council on the Arts, which advises the NEA.

“I’ve never heard of the endowment developing a plan with regard to these suggestions (for reorganization from outside),” Lichtenstein said. “It is absolutely astonishing to me. I’m busy trying to fight for the endowment to continue along the lines it has and without language to restrict the content of its art.

“If there has to be any change or if the endowment is to look at itself, that can be done in a calm atmosphere and not in a sense of hysteria or with the endowment’s back against the wall.”