A group of senior officials at the National Endowment for the Arts announced their resignations on Monday, days after the Trump administration began withdrawing grants from arts groups across the nation.
Their departures, which come as the endowment has been withdrawing current grant offers and President Trump has proposed eliminating the agency altogether next year, became public on Monday in a series of emails and social media posts.
An N.E.A. spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.
Among those leaving the agency are directors overseeing grants for dance, design, folk and traditional arts, and theater, as well as the director of the “partnership” division, which oversees work with state and local arts agencies. Those officials announced their departures in newsletters sent out by the endowment starting at midday on Monday.
The head of the agency’s literary arts division is also leaving, along with three members of her team, according to a newsletter sent on Monday morning by LitNet, a coalition of literary organizations.
The announcement of their departures left the besieged agency facing even more uncertainty. It is not clear how or whether the agency would issue grants without this tier of officials. A round of grant cancellation notifications that went out Friday night indicated that the agency expected to continue making grants, but in areas prioritized by Mr. Trump.
Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater in New York and one of the leaders of the Professional Non-Profit Theater Coalition, said the staff resignations were “worrisome.” He added that while he did not criticize anyone for leaving, he feared the departures could make it easier to eliminate the agency.
Mr. Eustis denounced the cancellation of funding that had already been pledged, which he said was particularly painful for small arts organizations around the country.
“This isn’t any kind of thoughtful, targeted reassessment of what the N.E.A. should be supporting — this is a massive across-the-board clawback of money that has been awarded to theaters across the country, many of whom depend on this money,” he said. “For the N.E.A. to do this is to subvert the premise it was founded on. They are undercutting and destabilizing institutions across the country, in every congressional district.”
Many of the departing officials are leaving the endowment at the end of this month as part of a deferred resignation program; some are retiring. In many instances, not only are the artistic field directors leaving, but so are members of their staffs.
The National Endowment for the Arts endowment, established in 1965, is an independent federal agency that distributes grants to arts organizations and state arts agencies across the country. Its budget was $207 million in 2024, and its financial report that year said it had provided more than $163 million in grants.
Arts institutions across the country were scrambling over the weekend to figure out how to move forward without federal funding they had been counting on.
Some said they would appeal the denial of grants, as specified in the notifications of the cancellations. Others launched fund-raising appeals, seeking to fill the gap with private philanthropy.
In Oregon, Portland Playhouse said donors had stepped up to replace a withdrawn $25,000 N.E.A. grant for a production of August Wilson’s “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” after news of the cut became public. On Monday, the theater’s leadership said it was starting a statewide fund-raising campaign in an effort to help other arts organizations in Oregon, estimating that the N.E.A. grant cancellations had ended at least $590,000 in arts funding in that state.
