Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. A book discussion series in rural Idaho public libraries . A program for veterans that uses war memorials as a way to spark remembrance and connection. An event series showcasing America’s wide-ranging music traditions . Support for the Sitka Native Education Program in Alaska . Summer institutes for teachers nationwide. Modest stipends to support individual research. These are just a few of the programs at risk following the Department of Government Efficiency’s drastic decision last week to rescind more than 1,000 grants that had been awarded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Much of the DOGE rhetoric around program elimination has centered on returning control of taxpayer dollars to the states—but that is already how the NEH operates, through the mechanism of state and regional humanities councils. As Phoebe Stein, president of the Federation of State Humanities Councils , told me, funding for the 56 state and jurisdictional humanities councils is entirely community-controlled; it is grassroots work with significant oversight and accountability. The NEH is quite small as federal agencies go; as historian Karin Wulf reported , the NEH’s 2024 grant budget was just $211 million, compared to the National Science Foundation’s $9.06 billion. But the funding that the NEH provides—to researchers, universities, state humanities councils, and cultural organizations—has an outsize impact. Stephen Kidd, executive director of the National Humanities Alliance , described the loss of funds as “absolutely devastating.” Kidd notes that the NHA is pushing congressional allies to take action to reinstate the funds, and we may see l awsuits brought, like those that followed National Institute of Health grant cancellations . If the cuts are upheld, however, small local museums and libraries will almost certainly close. Efforts to digitize local newspapers have ceased. The book festival your kids love each summer? It won’t happen without funding to the state humanities council that supports it. “These are our anchors. This is our cultural heritage. Eliminating this funding jeopardizes the ability of communities to preserve their history,” Stein said. “We are talking about these things disappearing.” The canceled grants, as of now, total more than $363 million (according to a database developed by the Association for Computers and the Humanities , since an official tally is not available from the NEH). This is only 0.000054 percent of the federal budget—but the losses are incalculable. As Kidd said, “What we lose is the capacity to preserve local culture and heritage. Many small institutions depend on grants to help them preserve artifacts, manuscripts, materials that are essential to their community’s ability to grapple with their past and think about a course for the future.” Federal funding provides essential revenue for state humanities councils, which in turn create jobs, develop programming, and award grants. This work is particularly essential in rural communities, which might not otherwise have avenues to support cultural, historical, and artistic work. As Idaho Humanities Council executive director David Pettyjohn told me, “The [federal] funding is actually seed money, as grantees generate an average of $3.77 in cost-share for every $1 in federal funding.” Without it, he said, IHC “would not be able to fund programs like Museum on Main Street , which brings a Smithsonian exhibit to rural communities free of charge, or Let’s Talk About It , a reading and discussion program that reaches 25 Idaho libraries per year. At a higher level, IHC would not be able to connect Idahoans and provide opportunities to find common ground.” The funding supports historic preservation and original creative work, too; one of the canceled grants to the IHC would have supported the restoration of a 1919 film, Told in the Hills , the first feature film shot in Idaho, which was made in collaboration with hundreds of members of local bands of the Nez Perce Tribe who participated as actors and creative consultants, according to Kenworthy Performing Arts Center executive director Colin Mannex. Original films on historic subject matter, such as Coming Home: Fight for a Legacy , about women pilots in World War II, and You Should Never Blink , about artist and activist Sister Corita Kent, suddenly face a loss of funding mid-production—a devastating situation for independent filmmakers. Jillian Schultz and Leah Thompson, co-principals of the film company Two Tigers Productions, which is developing the film on Corita Kent, told me they began work on the film in 2021 and have “spent more than $300,000 and countless hours of sweat equity since that time.” Now, they’re not sure what will happen—and as Schultz noted, “The termination of this funding also eliminates direct support to the local creative economy, as this production provided income to a team of editors, cinematographers, and producers during a particularly challenging moment in the broader entertainment industry.” The abrupt cancellation of grants to state humanities councils as well as universities, nonprofits, and individuals is creating a wave of dismay and disruption across the nation’s ecosystem of history, arts, and culture. Some of the people I spoke with had just gotten the news that they had received funding, only to learn two days later that it was gone. This was the case for Moira Armstrong, a Ph.D. student at Rutgers, who was accepted into a summer institute in Ohio on pandemics and public health that was meant to bring college educators together to learn about, discuss, and develop teaching strategies on this very relevant topic—only to learn two days later that the entire institute had been canceled. Armstrong described it as a “terrible roller coaster,” noting that “On Wednesday, I was telling my colleagues and loved ones the good news and looking at booking travel, and on Friday morning, it was over before it had started.” This chaotic timeline was certainly not the result of decisions made by NEH staff; in fact, grant officers were not even notified that awards in their portfolios were being rescinded, and in many cases could not even verify for concerned grantees whether their funding had been canceled. As others have reported , the cancellation notices came from an unfamiliar email address—outside the standard NEH communications portal, and not even from a .gov domain—causing many of them to get caught in spam filters or flagged as phishing attempts. The lack of coordination was embarrassing and upsetting to institute organizers, too, who were caught between would-be participants and grant officers they could no longer reach because they had been placed on administrative leave with no warning. An NEH staff member who is on administrative leave and wishes to remain anonymous described the process as “incompetent to the point of cruelty.” Charles Tocci, a faculty member at Loyola University Chicago’s School of Education, echoed this sentiment as he described how he felt navigating the rapid changes to a scholarly institute for K–12 teachers on the topic of the Gilded Age that he co-organized with Crystal Johnson of the Chicago History Museum: “It’s all very confusing and betrays brazen incompetence,” he told me by email. “We admitted teachers to our program on Wednesday morning, received a cancellation notice from the acting director via a Microsoft.com email address overnight, had to call all our teachers Thursday morning to let them know that … and then our money arrived Friday afternoon. Just an absolute mess that leaves us and our 30 teachers in limbo. Are we cancelled? Are we on? Will money be clawed back in the future? Are communications outside official channels official???” These sudden swerves mean that labor and resources are being thrown by the wayside. The life cycle of a grant is complex and time-consuming, involving dozens of people at different stages of the process. Grantees generate ideas, build partnerships, create a work plan, and write proposals, while NEH staffers and volunteer peer reviewers work to bring in new voices, vet proposals, and offer feedback to applicants. All of this labor happens before the work of the project itself even begins. Claudia Allen, director of advancement for Maryland Humanities , says their organization is still playing a waiting game for two grant applications that they submitted, one to the NEH and one to the Library of Congress. These proposals “took hours and thousands of dollars to write, and we have received no communication,” she said, noting that their staff is expecting that the programs will be terminated. In the case of capital projects, the waste is even more egregious. The Office of Challenge Programs funds projects that are meant to support the long-term infrastructure and capacity of institutions that support humanities research and programming, often in the form of physical construction. Some of these grants were already well underway, with construction long since started—only to have their funding pulled. An NEH staff member described one such project in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire, where planning for a new public library has been underway for years, and construction just began in recent months . Now, their funding is gone. What happens to a capital project when the walls are up but there’s no roof yet, and the money disappears? When these grants are pulled midstream, all that labor is lost. Moreover, it erodes trust—all the coalition-building that goes into securing community support for a significant and disruptive project is washed away. These cuts—like those at the U.S. Agency for International Development, at the Institute of Museum and Library Services, at the NIH, and too many other agencies—are allegedly being done in the name of cost savings, but instead they are wasting taxpayer dollars through misuse of appropriated funds and through the now-discarded labor of public workers. And of course, as in so many of DOGE’s interventions, these shifts in spending are wildly unconstitutional, as the money has already been appropriated by Congress.
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