Federal arts and humanities programs targeted for elimination by the Trump administration would get a lifeline from House appropriators willing to ignore the president’s proposal and keep them running.

The $31.5 billion fiscal 2018 Interior-Environment spending bill approved by the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday includes $145 million for the National Endowment for the Arts.

While that’s still a 3.2 percent cut from the fiscal year 2017 enacted level, it is more than $116 million above Trump’s budget request. The National Endowment for the Humanities would receive $145 million in fiscal 2018, which is $103.7 million above the White House budget request.

The NEA and NEH, which both receive only a tiny fraction of federal spending, faced the specter of erasure when President Donald Trump in his fiscal 2018 budget outline proposed starting to wind down the programs next year. In justifying its proposal, the White House said the agencies could continue to receive funding from private donors, and argued that it does not consider the activities of those programs “to be core federal responsibilities.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has backed Trump’s plan to gut the programs, has described them as “welfare for cultural elitists.”