Your Hobbies: Playgrounds, Parks & Public Pools

The National Endowment for the Arts supports both individual non-profit arts organizations and state arts agencies. These funds support a wide variety of arts events including exhibitions in public buildings and spaces, community theater and musical performances, with a special focus on bringing arts and cultural enrichment to underserved communities. But, the Trump administration wants to eliminate the NEA and has, for several months, been notifying grant winners that their grants are being terminated. In July of 2025, the Appropriations committee voted to decrease the NEA’s budget by 35%.
Federal support for the arts is being phased out—putting grants for local theaters, museums, arts programs, and cultural organizations at risk.

The Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) is the most important source of federal funds for public libraries all across the country. IMLS funds help pay for impactful library programming like life-long learning, computer skills training, and early childhood programs. Public libraries are cherished places for access to books, culture, learning. They are also safe and cool places within American towns, very much at the center of community life. But, President Trump has proposed eliminating the IMLS in every year of every term that he has been in office and in March of 2025 he issued an executive order stating that the IMLS must “be reduced to minimum presence required by law”. By the time states sued to protect the agency and the Justice Department gave up on defending the order, grants had been frozen, staff had been cut, and many libraries and museums were already feeling the effects.
The Trump administration tried to shut down the Institute of Museum and Library Services by executive order in 2025. Twenty-one states sued, and the Justice Department eventually stopped defending the order. The budget request for 2027 once again seeks to eliminate IMLS.

Much of the federal financial support for parks comes from the Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). The money in the fund doesn’t come from tax dollars. It comes from royalties that private companies pay the government in return for using public lands. It’s a pretty simple concept: when private companies extract oil, gas, or minerals from public land, they pay royalties to the federal government. A small share of the royalties is set aside to preserve land and build parks. You’re not paying for the park, a company that dug one park is paying for the purchase and maintenance of other parks. LWCF funds have helped build or improve more than 40,000 parks and recreation projects across the country—everything from ballfields and boat ramps to urban playgrounds and walking trails.
Congress permanently funded the Land and Water Conservation Fund at $900 million a year in 2020 to protect parks, trails, and public lands. Now, the administration is seeking to divert more than one-third of that funding into building access roads and expanding timber harvesting instead.