Trump plan to defund the arts could hit video game educational programs

U.S educational game development programs relying on funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) are at risk, after embattled President Donald Trump’s proposed budget names the NEA as one of the departments that will be dismantled under the new financial plan.

Nothing is set in stone yet, but it’s worth worrying about as, according to Kotaku who broke the story, the NEA has funded at least 34 grants to video games since 1998. A lot of this grant money goes to funding game design programs and classes in education or to support games that seek to promote social change or educate.

Despite this, the NEA says that its 2017 operations will remain unchanged and that they’ll still accept 2018 grant applications until a budget plan is formally passed.

“The loss of federal funding affects our overall operating and programming budget significantly,” Susanna Pollack, Games for Change President, told Kotaku. “We will have to re-evaluate the scale of the G4C Festival and the reach that we can have with our educational programs.”

If you’re a developer, or interested in the games industry as a whole, this should be cause for concern. You can read more about the potential impact of the budget plan on the industry with Kotaku’s full write-up.