NEA Implementation of Trump’s “Gender Ideology” Order Ruled Unconstitutional
146Sept. 24, 2025
A Rhode Island federal court on September 19 ruled that theNational Endowment for the Arts(NEA) could not implement a new policy of reviewing grant applicants to make certain they comply with a White House executive order regarding “gender ideology,” on the grounds that such a policy violates the US Constitution, theNew York Timesreports. The order, issued in January, stipulated that “federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology,” which the Trump administration defined as including “the false claim that males can identify as and thus become women and vice versa.”
In March, the American Civil Liberties Unionfiled suitagainst the NEA on behalf of several arts organizations, including Rhode Island Latino Arts and the New York–based National Queer Theater. The plaintiffs, all of which affirmed that they had created or promoted work about transgender and nonbinary themes, asserted that the NEA’s new policy would effectively prevent them from seeking grants “on artistic merit and excellence grounds,” and thus violated their First Amendment rights.
In April, with the suit pending, the NEA announced that it was revamping its evaluation procedure regarding “gender ideology” and issued a “final notice” in which it explained that its chair would assess applications on a “case-by-case” basis with the goal of identifying “artistic excellence and merit, including whether the proposed project promotes gender ideology.”
District Court Judge William E. Smith, an appointee of President George W. Bush, ruled against the arts endowment’s original policy and its altered version. Smith said that the former went against the 1965 law establishing the NEA endowment, which ordered grants to be awarded based “on talent alone, irrespective of the artists’ viewpoints or the messages conveyed in their works.” Under the new policy, Smith ruled, “projects deemed to promote gender ideology are less likely to be approved for N.E.A. funding.” The court called the final notice a “restriction on artists’ speech, and one that is viewpoint based, because it assigns negative weight to the expression of certain ideas on the issue of gender identity.”