ACLU Sues NEA Over Adherence to Trump Anti-Trans Mandate
146March 8, 2025
TheAmerican Civil Liberties Unionon March 6 filed suit against the National Endowment for the Arts, accusing the latter of enforcing the Trump administrationexecutive orderforbidding grant applicants to “promote gender ideology” in their work. The ACLU lodged its complaint with the US District Court for the District of Rhode Island on behalf of four performing arts groups—Rhode Island Latino Arts, National Queer Theater, The Theater Offensive, and the Theatre Communications Group—whose work centers LGTBQ+ people and issues. The suit comes after the NEA issued guidelines to applicants asking them to guarantee that they would hew to the January 20 order—titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”—and ahead of the arts organization’s March 24 deadline for its current round of Grants for Arts Projects.ACLU lead counsel Vera Eidelman toldNPRthat the ban on so-called gender ideology is unconstitutional under the First and Fifth Amendments and, further, that it violates the NEA’s governing statute. “This new prohibition runs directly counter to the point of the NEA, and to the point of art in general, which is to explore ideas, explore the diversity of human experience,” Eidelman told the platform. “Forcing artists to be a mouthpiece for government views really runs counter to that.”
The NEA, like other government agencies, has in recent weeks struggled to reckon with the flood of executive orders pouring out of the White House. In February, the organizationended its Challenge America grant program, which supplied $10,000 grants to small arts organizations targeting “underserved groups and communities that may have limited access to the arts relative to geography, ethnicity, economic status, and/or disability.” Too, it revealed that it would alter its 2026 grant guidelines, prioritizing projects that celebrate the upcoming 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this seemingly in response to a January 29executive orderestablishing a task force that will “plan, organize, and execute” the celebration of the United States’ semiquincentennial.