NEWS CENTER

Congressional Updates from Americans for the Arts

July 15 – The House Subcommittee on the Interior had proposed an $8 million cut each from the FY 2015 budgets of the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

We’re really pleased to report that when this bill came before the Full Appropriations Committee today, the Interior Subcommittee Chairman Ken Calvert (R-CA) announced that he had made some “manager’s amendments” to the bill. He restored the cuts to the two federal cultural agencies and now the bill moves to the House floor with a $146 million recommendation for the NEA and NEH each.

July 17 – One more piece of good legislative news coming out of Washington, DC this week. The House of Representatives passed a bill 277-130 to make permanent a series of charitable tax provisions. Specifically, two of these provisions will help nonprofit arts organizations raise private donations while offering individual taxpayers enhanced tax deductions. It’s a win-win situation. If these provisions also get passed by the Senate and signed into law by the President, they would do the following:

· Extend through April 15 the deadline for claiming charitable donations on the previous year’s tax filing.

· Encourage taxpayers 70.5 years of age or older to make a charitable donation by designating a charity to receive their automatic IRA distributions directly, instead of themselves, which would otherwise have been subject to income tax.