On July 22, 2025, the House Appropriations Committee met to write the government's spending plan for the year. Idaho's own Mike Simpson — who chairs the subcommittee that controls money for the Interior Department, the national parks, and the Kennedy Center — used that meeting to do something that had nothing to do with Idaho.

He put language in the bill to rename a theater after the President's wife.

Here is the whole thing, word for word from his own press release:

That the Opera House located in the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts shall be known and designated as the "First Lady Melania Trump Opera House".

Simpson was proud of it. He put out a press release the same day. He gave an exclusive to a friendly outlet. And he explained his reasoning like this:

"Naming a theater after her is an excellent way to recognize her appreciation for the arts."

The Same Bill Cut Arts Funding by 35%

Here's the part Simpson didn't put in the press release.

The bill he was praising himself for — the one he wrote, as chairman — cut the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities by 35 percent.

The numbers are not small:

• The NEA and NEH would each get $135 million, which is $72 million below what Congress gave them the year before.
• That would be the NEA's lowest funding level since 2007 — and that's before you account for inflation.
• Congress had funded the NEA at $207 million in each of the three previous years.
• The Kennedy Center itself — the building he wanted to put a name on — took a 17.2 percent cut, down to $37.2 million.

So the bill honored the First Lady for her "appreciation for the arts" on one page, and took a third of the country's arts money away on another.

His Hometown Paper Was Not Impressed

The Idaho Statesman's editorial board — the newspaper in Idaho's biggest city — published a response the same day. They did not hedge.

They called it sycophancy. They asked the obvious question: is this really what blue-collar, working-class voters in Idaho are worried about? They pointed out that Simpson used to be a genuine supporter of the arts and humanities, and that he'd now slipped a flattering name into a bill that guts both. And they offered two guesses about why — either he cut a deal with Trump to save some arts funding in exchange for the name, or he's up for reelection and does not want a Trump-backed primary opponent.

Their verdict: this level of subservience is downright embarrassing. Simpson embarrasses himself — and worse, he embarrasses Idaho.

That is Idaho's own paper. Not a national outlet. Not an opponent's press release.

Meanwhile, Back in Idaho

Here's what makes the timing so ugly.

Three months before Simpson's markup, the Trump administration cancelled the Idaho Humanities Council's federal funding outright — effective immediately, by letter, with no warning. The letter said the NEH was "repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President's agenda."

That single letter wiped out 75% of the council's budget. Its executive director, David Pettyjohn, told the Idaho Capital Sun the grant had been worth about $930,000 the year before.

The Idaho Humanities Council is not a Washington think tank. It's a 52-year-old Idaho nonprofit that takes no state money. What it does with those federal dollars:

• Funded projects in 27 of Idaho's 44 counties in fiscal year 2024
• Brought traveling Smithsonian exhibits to small Idaho towns at no cost to the community — the 2025 tour was set for Burley, Moscow, Coeur d'Alene, and Priest River before it was put on pause
• Paid for exhibits and programs at the Boise Art Museum, and speaker events across the state
• Backed a College of Idaho history professor's project collecting oral histories from people who've watched southwest Idaho change

Between 2020 and 2023, the NEH sent more than $5.7 million to the Idaho council and to Idaho projects.

Pettyjohn's reaction says it plainly: the council had been fully compliant with everything the NEH asked for over 52 years. "This was really unexpected."

So: Idaho lost its Smithsonian exhibits and its county history grants. And Idaho's man on the Appropriations Committee spent his markup naming a theater in Washington, D.C.

He Had the Gavel. That's the Point.

It would be one thing if Simpson were a backbencher with no say. He isn't.

He has represented Idaho's Second District since 1999 — 27 years. He chairs the Interior, Environment, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee. In his own words, that subcommittee "oversees federal funding for capital repairs and operations and maintenance at the Kennedy Center." It also oversees the NEA and the NEH.

That is real power. Simpson is one of a small number of people in Congress who could have written a different number into that bill. He is the person who decides what the first draft says.

He used it to write a name.

And when the cuts came for Idaho's humanities money, Simpson wasn't sounding an alarm — he was making excuses for the people doing the cutting. Asked about DOGE in a March 2025 interview, he said: "They might be right. This might be the only way you could do it."

It Didn't Even Work

The renaming never happened.

When Congress finally passed the actual Interior spending bill in January 2026, the Melania Trump Opera House was gone. Spending bills need 60 votes in the Senate, and a partisan flourish like that was never going to survive.

So the whole exercise bought Idaho nothing. The paused Smithsonian tour didn't come back. The cut humanities money wasn't restored. All Idaho got out of it was a national news cycle about its congressman's sycophancy, and an editorial in its own paper calling him embarrassing.

We Deserve Better

We should be able to expect that the person Idaho sends to the most powerful committee in Congress spends that power on Idaho.

Simpson had the pen. He could have protected the humanities money that brings the Smithsonian to Burley. He could have fought the letter that took 75% of the Idaho Humanities Council's budget overnight. He could have written a bill that didn't cut arts funding to its lowest level in nearly two decades.

Instead he wrote a name on a building in Washington, D.C., and asked us to call it an appreciation for the arts.

We deserve better.

Source

This post draws on the Idaho Statesman editorial board's Simpson's sycophancy: Rename Kennedy Center opera house after ... Melania? (July 22, 2025), Simpson's own press release, and reporting from American Theatre and the Idaho Capital Sun.