The points of hacking money from the NEA (both of them) and NEH are manyfold: it stops paying for propaganda, destroys empire building, allows Trump to focus on the next big thing, lets the Left rant and wear themselves out, sets a precedent so both Dims and GOPE know what to expect from Trump.
Plus the biggie: a large part of the propaganda budget goes to NBC, CBS, ABC for regular TV shows. Whack that, and they no longer justify themselves financially. Whack that, and they have to cut pay to Hollyweird. Whack that, and some of the talent goes to alt-media, ones that took the Hollywood gig to pay rent, but do not support the Left. Whack that, and eyeballs follow the Pizza.
There are many programs that should be reduced or eliminated for programmatic and policy reasons. We agree about that. But I'm sure we would disagree on the specific mix of cuts that should be on this list.
As one moves from entitlements to non-defense discretionary spending, most of the programs are relatively small to begin with. To get appreciable savings in this part of the budget, one has to make many, many cuts in myriad programs. Every one of these has a constituency that will go the mat for its program. And I'm willing to wager that every one of us here, when we look at the full list, will see several programs that we ourselves would want to protect (and even expand).
When I look at the Heritage and RSC cut lists, for example, or similar documents put out by others over the years (Tom Coburn made a career out of this), I will flip through page after page saying, "Ok, I like this cut." Then I will get to a section that deals with something I actually know something about, and I'll say, "Whoa ... what 23 year old, wet behind the ears staffer put this in here?" Staff gets tasked to come up with a list of cuts for talking point purposes. They're tasked to hit a dollar figure big enough to matter. They throw in everything they can think of. And they're own biases are on full display. They're not always right.
Remember: we're trying to deal with a multi-trillion dollar structural deficit and debt problem, driven by entitlements. A few billion, even a few tens of billions, in savings from non-defense discretionary spending is arithmetically irrelevant, but it maximizes opposition from these myriad small program constituencies. The question is, do you think this sense of shared pain makes it easier, or harder, to sell entitlement reform, which is the real ballgame?
This particular story is hung on proposed cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Fine. Cut them. In total, per the story, they're $741 million a year. That's two orders of magnitude shy of being big enough to be a rounding error.