NEA Faces Restructuring in Light of Budget Cuts : The arts: Staff reductions and the elimination of some grant structures are being proposed.

National Endowment for the Arts Chair Jane Alexander Friday morning began preparing the National Council of the Arts for a massive restructuring of the agency, proposing ways to ensure the NEA’s survival while facing drastic budget cuts that seem to be the inevitable consequence of a reduced appropriations bill working its way through Congress.

Facing up to a 40% cut--down to $99.5 million from this year’s $167.4-million appropriation--that already has been approved in the House and by a Senate subcommittee, Alexander, according to NEA spokeswoman Cherie Simon, told the council that staff levels will be reduced, and that the current grant structure providing grants to organizations for seasonal support will most likely be eliminated in response to limits imposed by Congress in favor of specific “project” grants. Support for individual artists will also almost surely be eliminated.

“We are here, we are alive, we are vital, and we will serve the arts well in the years to come,” Alexander said.

Alexander’s comments come as the National Endowment for the Arts awaits full Senate floor action on its 1996 appropriations bill following a recent series of crippling attacks by conservative members of Congress. On July 28, the Senate Appropriations Committee completed work on a bill that maintains a proposed cut of 40% by the House, but while House Republican leaders had agreed to phase out NEA funding entirely by 1997, a Senate committee approved a bill to keep the agency afloat for five years.

Simon said Alexander stressed the need to reduce not only the number of grants, but the number of grant applications that must be processed. The NEA currently processes about 16,000 applications, of which only a quarter become grants.

Simon said plans call for phasing out by February its current 17 programs and multiple separate grant categories, instead regrouping the grants into four “theme” groups: creation and presentation; heritage and preservation; education and access, and planning and stabilization.

Simon said that the peer panel review system will also be restructured to include an interdisciplinary panel review. As an example, she said that under the new system, a symphony orchestra applying for a grant in the “creation and presentation” category would first compete with other orchestras, then move on to a panel review in which it would compete with applicants from a range of artistic disciplines.