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On May 24 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit will hear oral arguments on whether the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is unconstitutional. The CFPB was created under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which passed in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession. The en banc court review of the CFPB, which follows a previous ruling that the bureau is unconstitutional, is a response to a claim it, unlike other regulatory agencies, is unaccountable to both presidential authority and Congress’s appropriations power. Its single director, who has a five-year term, cannot be removed by the president except “for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office,” and it is funded not by Congress but by the Federal Reserve, which has no oversight power.

President Trump’s first budget proposal would zero out funding for the national endowments for the arts and humanities (NEA and NEH), the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). From the outcry you’d think the abolition of these agencies as government entities, whose combined 2016 appropriations totaled $971 million out of a nearly $4 trillion national budget (roughly 0.0003 percent), would leave America a cultural wasteland. We know this can’t be true, however, because America was the furthest thing from a cultural wasteland before the national government became subsidizing cultural activities. But historical memory is short, so it’s worth reminding ourselves that jazz, the blues, rock and roll, and modern dance, theater, and literature all flourished without the government’s help. Indeed, we have reason to think that no government bureaucracy would have appropriated money to these edge art forms when they first came on the scene.