As part of his effort to shrink government, Trump cut humanities grants that have been used to record and share history for a half century
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- The Trump administration terminated over 1,000 grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, including funding for all state humanities councils.
- The NEH, which supports cultural and educational programs nationwide, is undergoing restructuring and staff reductions as part of the administration’s efforts to shrink government.
- The grant terminations have drawn criticism for jeopardizing historical preservation efforts, educational programs like National History Day, and research projects across the country.
After the federal building was bombed in Oklahoma City in 1995, a grant helped preserve stories of survivors. A similar grant supported the recording of oral histories from survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. Veterans centers, public schools and rural communities have also received some of the $42 million handed out by the state-run Oklahoma Humanities over the last 50 years.
That ended this week with a grant termination letter from the Trump administration.
“Our funding is quietly sustaining the cultural infrastructure and educational infrastructure of our state,” executive director Caroline Lowery told USA TODAY. “I think our absence will be felt once it’s too late.”
More than a thousand National Endowment for the Humanities grants were terminated this week by the administration, including grants provided to every state humanities council for decades.
The agency also sent an estimated 70% of its staff home on administrative leave while it weighs how to scale down as part of President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s attempts to reduce the size of government.
Among the terminated grants was the National History Day history competition that serves more than 500,000 students a year and is just weeks away from holding its national competition.
AFGE Local 3403, a branch of the American Federation of Government Employees that represents NEH employees said that an informal survey of its members reflected that most of its 180 NEH employees are in the process of being removed from their positions.
“NEH administers grants and funding for museums, libraries, researchers and others who seek to preserve the American story. Untold numbers of grantees have already been informed that their funding is being cut,” the union local said in a statement. “The union condemns these damaging cuts to people and funding. The arbitrary and dismissive approach to employees and grantees is frankly un-American and unacceptable.”
NEH did not respond to requests for comment, but the White House has repeatedly said cutbacks are necessary across the government to reduce waste and improve efficiency.
‘In a new direction’
Earlier this week 56 state and jurisdiction humanities councils across the country received a letter that their NEH grants were being terminated because the NEH is “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of President Trump’s agenda.” Nearly half of the NEH’s budget goes directly to humanities councils in every U.S. state and jurisdiction.
Lowery said she’s struggling with how abruptly the grant was terminated. Without the money, she and many others will be out of a job, and the work they’ve done to preserve the state’s history and culture for future generations will end.
“We are not a big, flashy, abstract D.C. agency. We are in Oklahoma. I’m from Oklahoma. I’ve lived here my whole life. This is my life’s work. We’re just a quiet agency working hard to make Oklahoma a better place, and have devoted our lives to this,” she said. “Our small office serves hundreds of thousands of people, in all 77 counties, in all five congressional districts.”
Oklahoma Humanities had to match the federal money with private investment before it could be spent. This year they received just under $1 million from the federal government.
“I don’t just get a blank check from the federal government. I am from an incredibly red, incredibly fiscally conservative state, and these are my taxpayer dollars too. This investment has been broadly supported by Oklahoma lawmakers and Oklahoma citizens for over 50 years, we turn a not even a rounding error in the federal budget into millions of dollars for the state,” Lowery said.
National History Day
NEH has always been a partner to National History Day, said executive director Cathy Gorn, and not just financially. The agency helped push the organization from a small Ohio-based contest to a national competition where more than 500,000 students across the country conduct and present original history research projects that “helps them understand their nation’s past and their place in their nation and in the world.”
“We always felt like we had confidence that NEH would be there to help History Day continue to do the great things that we do. So this is not just a loss of money, but it’s a real loss of that sort of sense of security, and that could be devastating,” Gorn said.
History Day received termination letters for its four-year grant totaling $650,000 and a two-year grant totaling almost $200,000 to create a teacher resource book that deals with Jewish American history and antisemitism.
This year’s regional competitions have completed and state competition’s are taking place amid the funding turmoil, she said. Compounding the loss is that several state humanities councils that just had their own grants terminated help run the state level competitions, Gorn said.
With private contributions she is “relatively confident” that the state programs will conclude and the national contest can take place in June. “Next year is sort of up in the air,” Gorn said.
Why fund humanities?
Stephen Kidd, Executive Director of the National Humanities Alliance, said the National Endowment for the Humanities, fills gaps that private donors miss.
“It funds organizations that other private funders don’t fund and frequently overlook or don’t even have contact with,” Kidd said “The loss of NEH funding and the loss of the agency would mean that heritage is not preserved in communities across the country, people don’t have access to museum exhibitions that tell their story, and the next generation of students won’t have the rich curricular resources that support learning in classrooms all over the country.”
The agency is mandated by Congress to operate across the country to make sure that every community has access to the humanities, the study of human experiences over time, and “ensure that community treasures of all kinds are preserved and help these communities preserve their heritage.”
“They include history and literature and languages and all of the things that look at what it means to be human, and to help us understand the context that our societies have lived in in the past, so that we can understand better our context in the present,” he said.
Kidd said the Alliance is still trying to get a scope of the terminations.
“Our understanding is that it is well over 1,000 grants. There does not seem to be any rhyme or reason to which ones were cut. It is just a broad swath of everything, including a number of grants for projects that have been incredibly impactful for veterans,” he said.
‘This will set me back by years’
NEH grants fall into two general pools: grants to state humanities councils and grants to individuals or institutions, said Nathalie Hester, who is a past grant recipient and has represented the University of Oregon at National Humanities Advocacy Day.
“Humanities funding tends to be under the radar a lot because these are relatively tiny amounts of funding, but they go such a long way. They fund a computer, they fund an airplane ticket, they fund interviews with people,” she said. “It’s a lot of elbow grease, and it goes such a long way. It’s community projects. It’s your local library. It’s the exhibits that your local museum prepares for your kids. It’s library archives so that all Americans have access to digital resources and historical information.”
The endowment also supports museums, libraries, preservation, history and media projects through a competitive application process.
“Getting an NEH is one of these things that is a milestone achievement in your career,” said Terrance Peterson, whose termination letter sent from a nongovernment account first landed in his junk mail folder.
Peterson was one of fewer than 20 professors selected nationwide this year for a grant that replaces part of their salary so they have time and resources to research and write a book.
Peterson’s work is focused on a French internment camp that opened prior to World War I and why countries choose to detain people rather than monitor them out in society. The idea was inspired by the ICE detainment facility near Florida International University where he is an Associate Professor of History. He’s four months into his year-long grant and is scrambling to see if the university will give him a few classes to teach.
Meanwhile he’ll have to complete his research whenever he can find time and money.
“This will set me back by years, easily,” he said.