For a national reading program, $1 million isn't a lot of money, but that's all the National Endowment for the Arts will spend this year on its once highly hyped Big Read. It's a 73 percent reduction.

The current NEA bosses have cut $2.7 million and 193 participants from the shiny jewel of the former Dana Gioia regime, a devastating rejection of a federal initiative that Mr. Gioia once suggested reversed the country's decline in reading.

Appointed by President George Bush in 2002, the occasional poet, opera lover and General Foods marketing executive focused on the literary arts, particularly after an NEA study, "Reading at Risk," determined that Americans were falling away from novels, plays and poetry.

The NEA determined that there was a 10 percent drop in adults reading those genres between 1982 and 2002. The biggest decline was charted among the 18-24 set -- 28 percent.

The chairman's response was swift and unimaginative. Instead of calling for creative approaches to encourage reading, Mr. Gioia modeled The Big Read after community reading projects in America and Great Britain. The concept is to urge residents to read one book, then discuss it in community forums.

The NEA staff then developed a list of approved books, study guides and even marketing tools for communities to get publicity.

The agency also injected more and more money in The Big Read in Mr. Gioia's term and, for reasons that still remain unclear, conducted similar efforts in Russia and Egypt.

Before the outgoing chairman took up a pleasant sinecure at the Aspen Institute, he announced on Jan. 13, 2009, that stunningly, America's reading decline had been reversed, due in large part to The Big Read.

That 10 percent decline posted in 2002 had miraculously turned around while Mr. Gioia was running the NEA, the agency claimed. The "overall rate at which adults read literature ...rose by 7 percent" since the NEA started the research in 1982.

"This dramatic turnaround shows that the many programs now focused on reading, including our own Big Read, are working," said Mr. Gioia. He also mentioned that many other non-NEA efforts may have helped.

Obviously, Rocco Landesman, the new NEA chairman, was unimpressed with his predecessor's magic -- with statistics, at least -- and the Big Read is on the ropes. Already gone are the Russian and Egyptian outposts.

Agency spokeswoman Elizabeth Stark gave the official explanation:

"At the NEA we have a practice of funding new programs at relatively high levels in their early years in order to encourage participation from the not-for-profit and funding communities. Now that the Big Read is in its fifth year ... , the NEA has scaled back its funding for 2010-2011 programming to a sustainable level."

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