In just over 18 months, the United States will turn 250 years old. Current turmoil only adds to the importance of the impending public pageant. In recent years, American political battles have grown toxic, with a widening divide between ordinary citizens and cultural elites. These conflicts often take on an all-or-nothing character and sometimes reveal an impulse for erasure, as exemplified by the 2020 wave of removing and destroying statues, from those of former presidents to those of Civil War soldiers. Ahead of our semiquincentennial, America needs a cultural initiative that affirms the profound range of our national life—call it a 2026 Project.
The 2026 Project would celebrate the nation’s founding and its people. Rejecting one-note ideological accounts, it would capture the wild complexity of the American story, memorializing the range of American accomplishments in the arts and sciences, entertainment, business, politics, and more. It would commemorate some of the country’s great victories, from the revolutionary achievement of 1776 to putting a man on the moon. It would capture the drama of American life: the Underground Railroad, Pickett’s Charge, Edison’s lightbulb, Citizen Kane’s visual pyrotechnics, D-Day, and the wizardry of space travel.
The incoming Trump administration is charged with stewarding federal efforts to celebrate 2026. Public policy can play a role in this and in the broader project of cultural renewal. In May 2023, the once-and-future president called for a Salute to America 250 that would launch a year of festivities, from May 2025 to July 2026. It would include a Great American State Fair in Iowa, athletic competitions for the young, and a revived statuary garden of American heroes. Additionally, Congress established in 2016 the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission, a bipartisan body to coordinate the celebration of a quarter-millennium of the American republic. While Congress initially required that the commission be sustained only by donations, it has since allowed the body to receive government funds. The commission counts some federal officials, such as the secretary of state, as ex officio members.
Policymakers can leverage federal cultural agencies and institutions to weave the semiquincentennial festivities into a bigger policy agenda that promotes a more affirmative vision of the American republic. Many of these institutions are technically independent bodies but nevertheless are overseen by government officials or appointees. For instance, the Smithsonian Institution’s governing board of regents is composed of the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the vice president, six members of Congress, and nine private citizens. Others are more directly administered by the federal government, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts.
By the standards of the U.S. government, the NEH and NEA budgets are relatively small, but the agencies can nevertheless have a real impact. Both organizations were appropriated $207 million in 2024 and primarily support cultural efforts through grants. The NEA, for example, gave about $65 million to state and local art programs in fiscal year 2023, while issuing almost $100 million in direct grants to individuals and organizations. The NEH offers a dizzying range of grant programs, including topic-based seminars for teachers and researchers, funding for scholarly editions of important texts, and subsidies for preservation efforts.
While they have professional staffs and rely on outside reviewers to assess projects, both the NEH and NEA are subject to political oversight. The chairs of each are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. They each have governing councils (the National Council on the Humanities and the National Council on the Arts, respectively) that are also responsible for reviewing grants. Council members serve staggered terms and are, like the heads of the organizations, subject to Senate confirmation after presidential nomination.
Some Republicans might be inclined to ignore these programs. That would be a missed opportunity, as Intercollegiate Studies Institute president John Burtka recently observed in the Wall Street Journal. If federal cultural programs are going to exist, the GOP should take an interest in administering them to serve the public interest.
These agencies could play a central role in the 2026 Project. NEA grants, for example, could fund murals, portraits, and other artworks commemorating American life. The NEH could sponsor initiatives for K-12 educators to use in teaching foundational national documents. Both organizations could send grants to smaller groups, particularly those without major institutional support, as a way of creating a more expansive public culture. For instance, supplementing classical-education programs could help reinforce an alternative to many contemporary educational theories. Promoting representational art (whether through grants to realist ateliers or direct grants to artists themselves) could help meet popular demand for art beyond just the explicitly political themes and abstract approaches favored in many elite institutions. While American public culture should remain more decentralized than that of many European countries—there is no real American equivalent to the Institut de France or the BBC—federal cultural programs can still celebrate the vast scope of the American experiment.
As part of the 1976 bicentennial, the Department of the Interior sponsored an “America 1976” touring art exhibition, in which 45 artists were commissioned to portray the modern American landscape. The National Endowment for the Arts provided crucial guidance and funding, including for a handsome catalogue of the exhibition (which featured a prefatory essay titled “Painting America First”). The catalogue shows, among many other images, sky-piercing mountains, industrial incinerators, Native American powwows, buffalos, and local Main Streets. They are all part of the American panorama.
So why not an “America 2026”—an exhibit that depicts life in the United States today? It could showcase the vast horizons of the West, the multihued blues of the Hawaiian waters, and the summits of New England. It would combine a trailer park in Oklahoma with the townhouses of the Atlanta suburbs and the soaring spires of Manhattan. It would commemorate working-class families and celebrities and veterans, star athletes and entrepreneurs and disabled supermarket clerks. Such an exhibit would document the true diversity of the American people and the expansiveness of American life.
It has been done before. More than a century and a half ago, a sometime federal employee named Walt Whitman tried in his constantly revised poetry collection Leaves of Grass to capture the range of our fast-moving republic. In the preface to his first edition, Whitman wrote of the United States, “Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the night and day. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.”
In his poem, “I Hear America Singing,” Whitman invoked the “varied carols” of American life:
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deck-hand singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing . . .
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.
As policymakers consider plans to mark America’s semiquincentennial, they should try to reconnect with Whitman’s capacious vision.
Top Photo: Photo by NASA/Liaison via Getty Images