Libraries Take a Hit in the Latest White House Order

E very few months I write about the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), a bit of a failure, and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which does — or did — some very good things. I very rarely write about the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLA), since I’m on the non-fiduciary advisory board. Or was. Last week I was terminated, along with all 17 of my fellow members.

President Trump appointed me in 2021. I was told I was his final appointee before he exited, to paraphrase Shakespeare, chased by more than one bear. I think I was the only Republican anyone in the White House knew with a lively, deep interest in museums and libraries.

In a way, I’m mortified. Hired and fired by Trump? I’m there with Scaramucci, Amarosa, and the idiot Rex Tillerson. Consolation? I was canned the same day as Christine Grady, the top bioethicist at the National Institutes of Health and Mrs. Sleaze Quack Fauci. I’m happy to go if she goes, too, tit for tat, though at the IMLS I got $200 a year — a month’s electric bill in my wacky Vermont — while she hauled in $300,000 monitoring her husband’s loosey-goosey ethics. Plus, she’ll get millions in pension dough. All 18 IMLS board members got the axe the same day, I think the same minute. I went down with the ship.

Our sin was sending two letters to the acting director asking to meet with him. Though our role was non-fiduciary, we were charged by statute with giving the director advice. We also asked for an explanation of the Trump executive order mandating that IMLS perform, and minimally so, only things that are “statutorily required.” The IMLS is funded through September. Most of the 70-member staff is on paid administrative leave. It won’t be making grants for the rest of the fiscal year. Only Congress can kill the IMLS, the NEH, and the NEA, since they’re established by statute. What the Feds are doing instead is pulling the plug on their capacity to function.

I don’t take it personally. Politics ain’t beanbag, and, as a presidential appointee, I’m forever entitled to be addressed as “the Honorable,” though I’ve yet to enjoy the thrill. And no one voted for Trump because he’s the beacon light of high culture. If that were my top criterion, I would have voted for Bill Buckley as a write-in, dead though he is. On IMLS itself, I enjoyed my time on the board. The staff was caring and conscientious, and the grants went to very good causes. I don’t have much experience with the NEH, also gutted, but when I was a curator, my shows got NEH grants, and I look at its list of grants every cycle, often writing about the good, the bad, and the ugly. The NEA has been lame for years. Aside from the federal indemnity for museum loan exhibitions, the NEA rarely moves the needle. I imagine it has a guillotine in its future.

“The government shouldn’t be supporting culture” always seemed like a leaky argument to me. The feds support nonprofit culture to the tune of billions each year in tax expenditures. Every dollar and work of art donated to the Met is tax-deductible. Its endowment income isn’t taxed. That’s the case for every museum in America as well as every nonprofit theater, opera company, dance company, and symphony. Of course, there’s the Smithsonian, with a federal subvention of a billion dollars, as well as the State Department’s shadowy culture division, the National Gallery, the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and on and on. The Smithsonian is building two new museums, together costing $1.1 billion, and that’s before they open their doors.

On direct grants, there are big-picture subjects that are national concerns, such as promoting high culture in the American heartland. Most of the IMLS’s work involves the digitization of archives, conservation, literacy, and supporting library and museum infrastructure. I’ve written a few times that NEH and NEA should privilege American art and scholarship on American topics, not entirely but more than they have in the past. And these three agencies, even the NEA, give money to lots of projects and places for which fundraising is tough. In ye olde Vermont, where I live, the philanthropic community is tiny. Vermont has always been a poor state. Our crazy legislature taxes the rich nearly out of existence.

I use libraries a lot. I know plenty of people are unhappy with the American Library Association’s turn far left. That’s not IMLS, and what the ALA does isn’t what most libraries do. In Vermont, my little library, serving four rural towns with 5,000 people, is traditional and practical. There are no drag queens reading to kids, no librarians with green hair, and no proselytizing. This month’s recommended reading shelf is about Robert Frost, who lived in one of the towns we serve. Last month’s books were on making maple sugar.

Last year I noted that Republicans have been saying since 1980 that they’d kill the NEA and the NEH, all while failing to do so. My suggestion was for Republicans to get engaged and make the agencies work better by focusing on heritage preservation, including arts infrastructure and conservation, the sesquicentennial, and the elusive but definable thing called quality. Too many people don’t know what’s good and what’s bad.

I’ve read that the federal government is not honoring IMLS and NEH grant commitments made during the Biden era, mostly in 2024. I’m not sure whether this is across the board, and like any good citizen, I don’t believe everything I read in the newspapers.

DOGE should honor the government’s commitments and pay them. I look at each NEH, IMLS, and NEA grant every cycle, not the application since I don’t have access, but the award description and the winner’s website. On NEH and NEA, there are plenty of grants I wouldn’t have made if I were king, but we’re not talking about shoveling cash to EPA billionaire pickpockets, Hunter Biden, or dead people getting Social Security checks. Most are nonprofits for which, say, a $50,000 grant is a lot of money. I don’t know what the point of reneging is. It seems spiteful. These organizations applied in good faith to competitive programs. Most signed contracts with the government. To say that the feds need the money “to safeguard the nation’s finances” is a joke. The federal government lost control of its finances years ago. Surely some aggrieved grantee will sue. Do we need more lawsuits? Many of IMLS’s grants match privately raised dollars. How much of this money will have to be returned?

With these three agencies drained, a billion dollars might very well disappear from what can very broadly be called the culture economy. But I always look for silver linings. I’ve heard, and it could change any minute, that federal “pass-through money” to state libraries and state arts and humanities agencies might be salvaged. Pass-through money, by law, accounts for 40 percent of NEA’s and NEH’s budgets, a bit more of IMLS’s. These state agencies in turn make very small grants. IMLS’s grants to state libraries pay for part of the administrative costs of the statewide library departments.

I wrote a few weeks ago that NEA and NEH spending, combined, is only a tiny percentage of what Americans spend on culture. Friends of mine think museums and libraries will close en masse. This won’t happen. The Met’s budget this year is about $400 million, twice the total budget of the NEA, and that’s only one museum. The loss of IMLS will bite, since a chunk of its money went to Native American libraries and museums. Unless a tribe happens to own a casino, it’s likely to be poor.

In the realm of “we can dream, can’t we?,” the rich foundations ought to realign their giving to support causes in which the IMLS, the NEH, and the NEA have, historically, specialized. This, I hope, will involve the abandonment of follies embraced after the 2020 “mostly peaceful” BLM rampage. The Mellon Foundation once supported high culture with its billions. Now it’s spending $500 million dismantling Confederate monuments and paying for new monuments. The Ford Foundation and the Terra Foundation mostly do racial reckonings. These priorities seem tired and passé as well as exercises in vanity. It’s time to be useful for a change. If promised grants aren’t paid, the big art foundations should join in a one-time program to make grantees whole.