White House says it will ‘likely’ award National Arts Medals for 2016 ‘later this year’

The White House on Sunday said it’s planning to issue National Arts Medals for 2016 “later this year” after the longest gap of any administration to hand out the awards.

“We are currently evaluating candidates and will likely issue later this year,” White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters told The New York Times.

President Trump has yet to distribute the National Medal of Arts to 2016 recipients. The award is typically given out to the winners during a White House ceremony every year.

The deadline for nominations for the 2016 awards passed in February 2017, according to the Times.

The 2016 National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation have also not been awarded.

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The Hill has reached out to the White House for comment.

There has often been an administrative delay for handing out the medals, the Times noted. Former President Obama took around 17 months before awarding the 2012 medals in the arts and humanities in July 2013, according to the Times.

“I’m hoping that it is a delay as opposed to a policy decision because I think it’s a good thing for these awards to happen,” Robert Lynch, president and chief executive officer of Americans for the Arts, told the newspaper.

Trump has a contentious relationship with the National Endowment for Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), having originally proposed eliminating the agencies in his first federal budget.

William Adams, the then-chairman of the NEH, resigned the same day as the proposed cut. 

All of the members of Trump’s presidential arts commission quit in August 2017 after Trump’s controversial defense of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va.

Several members of the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities during the Obama administration resigned immediately after Trump’s election.