In early May, after President Trump stated he’s looking to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) next year, his administration swiftly withdrew or terminated hundreds of NEA grants that had been promised or already awarded to cultural organizations across the country.
Grants promised to three jazz-centered organizations in Seattle—Earshot Jazz, Seattle JazzED, and South Hudson Music Project—were among them. Each were promised $25,000 in funding.
In a May 2 email to grantees, the NEA explained their reasoning for the abrupt termination of previously awarded grants. It said the NEA has updated their "grantmaking policy priorities to focus funding on projects that reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President.”
“Your project, as noted below, unfortunately does not align with these priorities,” the NEA email said.
Four months earlier in January, the NEA had notified 41 organizations in Washington state that they were “recommended” for an NEA grant, totaling over $1 million in funding. Of those 41 NEA grant recommendations for 2025, 10 awards totaling $255,000 were slated to support music-specific performance and education projects in the state.
According to the NEA grant process, award recommendation means that the grant applications submitted by these ten music organizations had passed the committee review process and were to be funded, once all the required legal paperwork was complete. Instead, KNKX has confirmed that all ten awards were withdrawn by the NEA earlier this month.
A hit to local jazz
Almost every year since Managing Director Karen Caropepe began at Earshot Jazz in 2006, the local jazz advocacy nonprofit and festival producer has received some sort of NEA grant funding to support the production of Earshot Jazz Festival. This annual jazz music festival began in 1989 and has become a Seattle tradition.
"Now we're committed and we're just learning we don't have the $25,000."Merica Whitehall, Earshot Jazz
This year would’ve been no different. After applying in early 2024 to fund the 2025 festival, they were notified in November 2024 that they had received a $25,000 NEA grant.
“We had already completed all of our acceptance paperwork,” Caropepe said. “We use the NEA grant to cover artist fees, venue fees, and some marketing for the festival.”
Each year, Earshot Jazz Festival’s revenue is a combination of earned income, or admissions fees, and contributed income, like grants, donations, and sponsorships. The $25,000 NEA grant they received for 2025 represented 25% of the budgeted contributed income for the festival. With the money, they had already begun to lock in the artists that will perform in the fall.
“We've been committing to contracts with artists with the expectation of using that $25,000. Now we're committed and we're just learning we don't have the $25,000. That's going to have incredible reverberations throughout the organization because we'll have to reduce spending,” said Merica Whitehall, interim executive director of Earshot Jazz.
If reducing spending and pulling from the budget for other programs isn’t enough, they may have to dip into their cash reserves—which, according to Whitehall, would hinder their ability to get future grant support because an operating reserve shows other major donors that an organization has capacity to carry out its mission.
Earshot is hoping they won’t have to go there. On May 7, the second day of a 48-hour online donation campaign for Wahsington State nonprofits called “GiveBIG Washington,” Earshot sent an email pleading for donations from the community to help offset this funding loss.
Forced to scale back
Without their promised NEA grant, Seattle JazzED, a Seattle-based jazz education nonprofit, and South Hudson Music Project, a nonprofit music presenter that works in close relationship with the Columbia City music venue The Royal Room, will also have to pivot or scale back their work considerably.
Seattle JazzED’s Academic Year programs provide approximately 300 kids with weekly jazz classes and ensemble rehearsals throughout the school year. Liz Riggs Meder took over as Seattle JazzED’s new executive director in January. She said the loss of this grant will directly impact their ability to make these year-round programs accessible to every family, particularly because the organization is already struggling financially.
“We allow people to select the tuition that feels possible for them. Our ability to do that is directly funded through individual donations and grants,” Riggs Meder said. “So basically, losing $25,000 is $25,000 less we have available to families who wouldn't otherwise be able to access music education programs outside of school or even at all...because we're seeing funding for [school music programs] cut as well in a completely unrelated way.”
In his decades of applying for and receiving grants for his own personal projects and as executive director of South Hudson Music Project, lauded musician Wayne Horvitz has never had a grant awarded and then rescinded. That’s what makes this particular situation so infuriating to him.
“Plenty of presidents or CEOs come in and change their agendas, but they don't take away things that were already given...it just shows no sense of class or decorum,” Horvitz said.
Decades ago, Horvitz served on the review committee for NEA grants, and he’s grateful to have previously received grants from the NEA, as well as from the City of Seattle, King County, and the Raynier Foundation. This money has been essential to running South Hudson Music Project and to creating ambitious new compositions and musical performances for the public to enjoy.
With the NEA’s $25,000 grant, South Hudson Music Project had planned to carry out a 4-night festival in the fall called, “What’s Going On,” a tribute the innovative work of mid-century Black musical conceptualists Lawrence Douglas “Butch” Morris, Henry Threadgill, and Sun Ra with performances at The Royal Room, Hidden Hall, and The Chapel Performance Space.
“The significance is just simple. It's the money, you know? I have $25,000 less to put this festival on than I did. And so, I have to just rework everything,” Horvitz said.
Horvitz still hopes to move forward with “What’s Going On,” but without the grant he will have to pull money from other sources and scale back his programming ambitions for South Hudson Music Project next year, he said. As a result, Horvitz, who’s known widely for his support of the local music community, will have a reduced number of paid gigs to offer local musicians.
“It just reflects the values [of this administration] in the most unpleasant sort of way,” Horvitz said. He finds the fact that these grants were pulled in the name of wasteful government spending to be “rank hypocrisy,” pointing to Trump's plans to throw an up to $45 million military parade on June 14.
Fighting for the future
An appeals process was offered to all grantees who had their grants rescinded. To appeal, organizations needed to send an email to the grants office by May 9 that provided “documentation” on how their projects aligned with the president’s new priorities.
Earshot Jazz, Seattle JazzED, and South Hudson Music Project all opted to file an appeal. But due to resignations at the NEA, incited by Trump’s cuts to the agency, there is much skepticism about whether or not their appeal emails will even be opened.
“I don't even know if people are employed at the NEA anymore,” Riggs Meder said. “So, that email may just live on a server for the rest of its life.”
Inspire Washington is a key advocate of preserving funding for arts and culture organizations in Washington state. According to Executive Director Manuel Cawaling, their organization is working quickly to support the state’s cultural sector, fight for this lost grant money, and preserve funding for Washington’s arts and culture going forward. Their strategy is three-pronged.
First, they’re tracking the political state of play, including executive orders and lawsuits on their website so that cultural organizations and the public can better understand the impacts of these federal actions. Likewise, they’re setting up in-person meetings with Washington’s congressional delegation where they can represent and advocate for the needs of the state’s cultural sector—including attempting to recoup this grant funding.
"Losing $25,000 is $25,000 less we have available to families who wouldn't otherwise be able to access music education programs."Liz Riggs Meder, Seattle JazzED
Lastly, Inspire Washington helps the public to agitate on behalf of the cultural sector through their grassroots advocacy website Inspiration League. On the site, they provide the public with customizable email templates called “action alerts" that constituents can easily fill out and send to their representatives, among other resources.
Cawaling stressed this is a pivotal time for the future of arts and culture in the country. Aside from this funding that was recently revoked, Congress is just beginning talks about the funds they will appropriate for the country’s 2026 budget.
If Congress carries out the president’s wishes and doesn’t appropriate funds for the NEA, the government will only be required to fund arts at the statutory levels, which, according to the NEA, was only 0.0003% of the total federal budget in 2024.
“Right now, if people care about arts and cultural programming, it is about pushing back on the terminations, and it is asking members of Congress to appropriate money for next year, or we have nothing to argue about, you know?” Cawaling said.
Meanwhile, those Washington cultural organizations that lost their grants are reeling, hoping for increased public support, and trying to make sense of the federal government’s approach.
“It’s not just about the $25,000 that’s been lost. It's about the future of funding for arts and culture in our country...” said Earshot’s Whitehall. “It’s very confusing and perplexing how the federal administration can think that America can continue to innovate and lead without funding creativity and imagination.”
