It's sadly fitting that the National Endowment for the Arts, one of the latest targets of President-elect Trump’s insatiable pique, began as an act of hope. While the idea that the arts “have a primary claim” on patriotic Americans can be traced back to a quote from George Washington, the New Deal established the first major federal arts funding for the practical reason of creating jobs during the Depression. By contrast, the 1965 creation of the NEA under President Lyndon B. Johnson embodied, as a history of the agency notes, only “idealistic optimism” that “functioned purely as an exaltation of the spirit.” Pretty stirring, right?

Well, say goodbye to that hopey, changey stuff. According to a new report in The Hill, the NEA would be “eliminated entirely” under plans Trump transition staffers are sharing with career White House employees. Same goes for the National Endowment for the Humanities, another independent federal grantmaking agency that was established in 1965 alongside the NEA. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting would, paradoxically, “be privatized.” Artists needn’t feel lonely; the cutbacks would be part of a broader tightening of the purse strings at the departments of Commerce, Energy, Transportation, Justice, and State.

As the involvement of LBJ in its creation may suggest, partisan battles are nothing new for the U.S. agency charged with promoting and funding the arts across communities nationwide. President Ronald Reagan, as a former actor ostensibly an artist himself, planned to abolish the NEA when he arrived in office in 1981. Senator Jesse Helms, all riled up by photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, helped lead another in a series of right-wing attacks on the endowment in 1989.

For free-market libertarians (we see you, absurdly self-impressed white guy on Facebook) and religious conservatives, the idea of federally funded art was probably always going to be a tough sell. But for the rest of us, to put this in context: what Trump would be destroying here is barely a rounding error in terms of the overall U.S. budget, but of great value to the artists it goes to support.

Besides, it’s not as if abolishing all that will balance the budget, let alone miraculously finance Trump’s proposed tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. According to NEA data, the endowment’s budget for fiscal 2015 was $146 million. That represents 0.004 percent of the overall federal budget, or 46 cents per American per year. It’s also almost one-third what the U.S. budget allocated last year for military bands. For an international comparison, the Canada Council for the Arts budgets eight times as much, on a per-person basis, with plans to double that by 2021.

And as The Washington Post points out, cutting $10.5 trillion from spending over the next decade, as the Trump team reportedly hopes to do, would mean eliminating virtually all of the government’s discretionary spending. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans’ budget resolution would, using their own estimates, add $9 trillion in debt over those same 10 years. With creative accounting like that, maybe the GOP likes art after all.

Historically, the agency has awarded thousands of grants for orchestras, jazz, operas, chamber music, and beyond. And just looking back through the past year or so, the array of specific programs affected by the endowment is dizzying. If you saw a video last year of David Bowie talking about working with Lou Reed, that was part of an NEA-funded digital archive. An Esperanza Spalding performance at Manhattan’s Baryshnikov Arts Center, a Steve Reich 80th-birthday celebration at Carnegie Hall, and a Quincy Jones tribute at the Monterey Jazz Festival are among endowment-boosted events from 2016.

Such funding has been crucial to at least one adventurous music festival contacted by Pitchfork. “The NEA’s support of Mission Creek Festival, via our parent organization the Englert Theatre, has been essential to our growth as a festival over the last two years,” says Andre Perry, co-founder of the Iowa City-based event, which this year has a lineup running the gamut from Floating Points to DIIV. “The funding specifically applies to our literary program and helps us support independent voices from across the literary spectrum—writers, publishers, editors—as well as connect them with our increasingly diverse communities here in Iowa. The bottom line: this funding is helping us to build and connect communities through culture. We think it’s important work.”