President Trump has issued his federal budget, and it contains not a penny for the National Endowment for the Arts, the federal arts funding agency that has been the perennial whipping child of the right.

Culture critics, such as The Times’ Christopher Knight, immediately noted that the NEA’s annual budget — which was nearly $148 million in fiscal year 2016 — is minuscule compared to other federal expenditures. Defense, for example, is more than 3,600 times that — almost $583 billion a year. (Perhaps it’s time to ask the Pentagon to economize on toilet paper?)