Washington ? In late January, Laura Bush went to the National Endowment for the Arts headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue and announced the good news: The president was requesting $18 million for a new program.

Now it’s December, and in the all-but-completed appropriations bill Congress will soon send to the president for his signature, that figure had dwindled to $2 million.

“American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius,” was meant to reacquaint people with the best of American dance, theater, jazz, classical music, literature and other arts. It would extend the National Endowment for the Arts’ reach into communities nationwide, give lawmakers bragging rights about bringing home artistic pork, and insulate the agency from political critics. Education was a critical focus. Artists were to be assigned to all 50 states.

Now the endowment for the arts is figuring out how to adjust to the new funding realities, for, even in an election year, not all high-profile promises survive the appropriations process.

Overall, most artistic enterprises dependent on federal dollars have survived the appropriations process, an analysis of the bill shows. The congressional appropriation gives $615 million for fiscal 2005 to the Smithsonian Institution. Last year it received $596 million.

That new number includes $44 million for the final federal payment on the renovation of Washington’s Patent Office Building, the historic site that contains the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It also provides $19.5 million for the National Zoo, including $14 million for the Asia Trail, the most extensive construction at the park in decades. Congress has given the Smithsonian nearly $4 million to continue planning and hiring staff for the future National Museum of African American History and Culture.