The National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting have long been in the cross hairs of conservative critics.

So let’s consider what would happen if Donald J. Trump as president finally made their dreams come true. Will he really eliminate the full range of programs — from grants that have drawn criticism to those that have been more widely embraced?

Here is a tour of the debate that reignited this month when The Hill newspaper reported that the Trump administration was considering eliminating the art and humanities agencies and defunding the nonprofit public broadcasting corporation as part of a wider program of federal budget cuts.

The White House has not confirmed the report, but a raft of organizations immediately condemned the idea, including the Association of Art Museum Directors, the American Alliance of Museums, Americans for the Arts and PEN America. Others have long applauded any effort to strip the funds, suggesting, among other things, that public television and radio promoted agendas out of step with much of America.

“The new conservative administration and congressional majority coming in have a responsibility to the conservative base not to continue to fund a ‘public broadcaster’ that leaves half the nation feeling ignored,” wrote Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation in a Jan. 21 article.

Not since the days of Ronald Reagan and later Newt Gingrich has the debate over federal arts spending seemed to roil so feverishly.

Here are some of the questions being raised that are driving the debate:

Would cuts save much money?

If these dots represent federal spending, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . then the combined budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would be the size of the period in this sentence.

Annual funding for the two endowments lags behind where it was in the early 1990s after controversies over money for provocative arts projects like Andres Serrano’s urine-immersed crucifix created a climate that led to budget cuts. The two endowment agencies each receive about $148 million a year now. The budget for public broadcasting, currently $445 million, has been more consistent over the years.

Together they still account for only $741 million, or much less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the United States’ annual federal spending, an amount supporters say is too small to make a difference. Conservatives suggest it will take many small cuts to roll back uncontrolled federal spending.

Is federal arts funding wasteful?

Artists by their very nature are supposed to push boundaries. But conservatives have long argued that federal arts funding underwrites a lot of silly projects. In 1990, they didn’t like Karen Finley’s chocolate smeared performance pieces and they don’t like a more recent program, “Doggie Hamlet,” a dance project set in a Vermont field with dogs and sheep. It was one of a number of works financed through $80,000 in grants to two New England arts groups. Described as “a full-length outdoor performance spectacle that weaves dance, music, visual and theatrical elements with aspects from competitive sheep herding trials,” the project was ridiculed in The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative online magazine, under the headline Taxpayers Foot Bill for ‘Doggie Hamlet.

Criticism was also recently directed at another project, this one designed to create a video game based on Henry Thoreau’s “Walden Pond,” and funded by $450,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Supporters of federal arts funding say the selection process includes an expert, independent panel and that the money has underwritten important work for decades. It was a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that helped pay for the “Treasures of Tutankhamen” exhibition to travel to six American cities from 1976-79. That groundbreaking exhibition, heralded as one of the first museum blockbusters, drew 1.36 million visitors to the Metropolitan Museum alone. Such work continues, supporters say, pointing to the National Endowment for the Arts funds that helped underwrite the Met’s recent “Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven.”

“It is the mark of a great democracy to support the arts, which are an expression of what makes us human,” the Association of Art Museum Directors said in a statementon Jan. 19.

Do the agencies have a leftist, elitist agenda?

“The NEA Is Welfare for Cultural Elitists,” the Heritage Foundation declared in a 1997 paper, “Ten Good Reasons to Eliminate Funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.”

“A radical virus of multiculturalism,” the foundation wrote,” has permanently infected the agency, causing artistic efforts to be evaluated by race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation instead of artistic merit.”

More recently, The Washington Times, a conservative newspaper, in 2015 criticized a $10,000 grant to a San Francisco theater company to help support “Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays,” a collection created, according to the grant proposal, “in response to the ongoing battle for marriage equality throughout the United States.” The newspaper suggested the award represented advocacy and gave the arts agency its Golden Hammer Award for “using tax dollars to fund a project that many Americans would find offensive.”

The National Endowment for the Arts said that the plays were worthy on their merits, regardless of their stance on issues. It has emphasized the extent to which its support for projects is apolitical and meant for all kinds of people. The agencies are particularly proud of programs they run to benefit veterans, such as the National Endowment for the Arts’ creative arts therapy project for military personnel at a hospital at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. In the program, which is expanding to 12 centers around the country, patients use exercises, like painting masks, to overcome traumatic brain injuries and psychological problems. “The patient is the one controlling it,” said Jackie Jones, a creative arts therapist who has worked with 270 military personnel since the project began three years ago. “They wind up gaining control over what used to control them.”

Do the three organizations ignore Middle America?

The organizations say that question is unfair. Some 40 percent of the arts and humanities agencies’ budgets go directly to state and regional arts councils across the United States. So the people of Utah or Massachusetts are then free to use the funds as they wish. The National Endowment for the Arts says it funds projects in every congressional district of the country. It acknowledges that it broadened its portfolio of communities partly in response to criticism in the 1990s. Among the places that benefit is Whitesburg, Ky., an Appalachian town of 2,100. Federal money there supports Appalshop, a center for local filmmaking, theater and a community radio station. Caroline Rubens, the center’s archivist, said National Endowment for the Humanities money helped create a climate-controlled archive where films, audiotapes and photographs about the region are preserved.

“Appalshop serves the rural and underrepresented population of central Appalachia,” Ms. Rubens said.

Should the government fund the arts?

Many of the largest arts organizations in the United States survive with just a smidgen of federal financial help. Critics of public funding for the arts say that is as it should be, that as a matter of principle support for the arts should not be a function of government. “These agencies can raise funds from private-sector patrons, which will also free them from any risk of political interference,” said a Republican congressional budget proposal in 2014.

Supporters of public arts funding point, on the other hand, to a host of educational and economic benefits, like tourism, that are often fostered by the projects they finance. Beyond that, they say, for every Metropolitan Museum of Art, where federal support is minimal, there are many other organizations that simply could not survive without public funding.

Take KRSU-TV, the public television station in Claremore, Okla. It broadcasts to 1.2 million homes in Tulsa and rural northeastern Oklahoma, and its station manager, Royal Aills, said the federal funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting make up close to 70 percent of his budget.

“Without C.P.B. funding, I don’t have a staff,” he said in an interview. “It pays for our staff and programming. They are the glue for us.” To be sure, most of the 1,500 radio and television stations that receive some funding from the corporation do not rely on federal subsidies to anywhere near that extent. But the corporation said that dozens of stations did rely on the federal money for 40 percent or more of their operating revenues.

“The federal investment in public media is vital seed money — especially for stations located in rural America,” the corporation said in a statement last week amid the speculation about its future.

Similarly endangered, advocates say, would be many art exhibitions that entertain the country, sometimes stopping at small and large museums. The cost of insuring the art shown in these exhibitions can be offset by a federal indemnity program administered by the National Endowment for the Arts. So when the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati staged “Daubigny, Monet, Van Gogh: Impressions of Landscape,” the most expensive project it had ever put on, the indemnity program paid for most of the insurance cost of bringing 54 on-loan paintings (out of 55 in the entire exhibition) to Cincinnati.

Visitors from 44 states and eight foreign countries visited the show, said Deborah Emont Scott, the museum’s director, and without the federal financing, “It would not have happened.”

Of course, the shuttering of some other arts organizations does not seem a looming catastrophe if you view the art they are producing as hopelessly banal.

“I am even more concerned about federal funding and political intervention leading to mediocrity,” said Romina Boccia, of the Heritage Foundation, “than I am about potentially controversial art being funded with taxpayer dollars.

An odd coincidence.

If you last visited the Washington headquarters of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts in 2014 and returned to say hello today you might be surprised. Both agencies moved out of the Old Post Office building on Pennsylvania Avenue to make way for a new tenant: the Trump International Hotel. It opened last fall after a renovation that cost more than $200 million, which, of course, is more than the budget of either of those agencies.