DOGE comes for the humanities
The shuttering of NEH, IMLS and The Wilson Center brings an ignominious end to a proud American tradition
For a brief period in my life, I aspired to someday be the Chairperson of the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).
It was a long-way off, as I was still quite junior in my career when I entertained the idea. But what a privilege it could be to represent the United States in advocating for the importance of the humanities to American public life—and to be able to distribute much-needed funding across the U.S. to celebrate and explore what it means to be human.
Perhaps, in the future, that aspiration will return. It will, however, necessitate the existence of the agency, which is now unclear. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) for all intents and purposes shut down the NEH this past week. The demolition began in mid-March when the Chair of the endowment, Shelly C. Lowe, was forced to resign. Then, this past Monday, reports leaked to the press and advocacy groups that DOGE planned to cut the agency and suspend its funding. At approximately 11:00 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, humanities organizations nationwide began to receive letters stating that their grants had been terminated in order to “safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities.” By Thursday evening, most NEH employees were placed on administrative leave. By Friday morning, it was clear that nearly all NEH employees would be RIF’ed, the government term for being laid off (RIF = Reduction in Force).
Simultaneously, DOGE was dismantling The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Long-time readers of this newsletter know that I was once a Global Fellow at The Wilson Center in the History and Policy Program. The Wilson Center had been a second home for me at various points during my career; when I was at the Library of Congress, we worked very closely with the Wilson Center, and, later, The center helped launch my book History, Disrupted. In mid-March, the President signed an Executive Order to reduce The Wilson Center to the minimum presence allowable by law. This week, the head of The Wilson Center, former Ambassador Mark Green, was removed, and by the end of the week nearly all Wilson Center staff were placed on administrative leave. Only four employees and one member of DOGE remained.
This all happened alongside the extirpation of the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). The same Executive Order from mid-March mandated that IMLS be reduced to the minimum function allowable by law. After installing a temporary director at the end of March, this past Monday all IMLS staff were placed on administrative leave with their access to IMLS emails revoked. The 2025 grant applications were placed on hold and millions of dollars in appropriated funds to support libraries were canceled. IMLS board members who questioned the legality of DOGE’s actions were also removed from their positions.
The Wilson Center, NEH and IMLS accounted for roughly $493 million annually that the American government invested in the humanities. That sounds like a lot of money—and it is! When I traveled overseas with the State Department, I had the privilege of telling my audiences that the U.S. government and American taxpayers had, for decades, been extraordinary supporters of humanistic inquiry. Nearly half-a-billion dollars each year supported research and programs devoted to music, poetry, art, ethics, religion, philosophy, history, language and literature. These investments included events of national significance such as a conference on the history of U.S. migrant policy at The Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., to programs with hyper-local significance such as a speaker series for teenagers at the Sand Mountain Cooperative Education Center in Guntersville, Alabama.
In one week, the funding for most of these programs has been withdrawn. In Nevada, the Nevada Humanities Council received approximately 75% of its funding from NEH. The sudden cessation of NEH means that the Nevada Humanities Council may cease operations. In Michigan, federal grants represented 90% of the budget of the Michigan Humanities Council, essentially putting that organization out of business. In Colorado, approximately 60% of the state’s library operations budget came from IMLS, meaning all Colorado libraries risk closures and layoffs. National History Day, a nationwide competition since 1974 that challenges students in grades 6 through 12 to research a historical topic and then present about it to a panel of judges, overnight lost more than $330,000 in funding, putting this year’s competition in jeopardy and making any future competitions impossible without new philanthropic support. Research programs at The Wilson Center such as the Indo-Pacific Program and Global Europe Program have posted on social media that they are shutting down all of their events and scholarships.
While these actions occurred in one week, the change were years in formation. In 2017, the President’s budget proposed eliminating NEH, IMLS, The Wilson Center and numerous other agencies. At the time, the rationale for eliminating NEH was “[the] Administration does not consider the activities within this agency to be core Federal responsibilities.” The rationale for eliminating the IMLS was that its efforts were duplicative of state, local and private efforts to support libraries. The Wilson Center, the administration said then, could be “supported through private fundraising”—plus, the Administration did not consider the center to be “core Federal responsibilities.”
Members of Congress refuted the President’s budget request and continued to fund these agencies. During the Biden Administration, many of their programs received slight funding increases. The current administration learned not to make the same mistake twice, though; instead of relying on the Legislative Branch to eliminate the funding, the administration reasoned that it could use the powers of the Executive Branch, vested within the Constitution, to reduce agencies to their lowest levels required by law, then allow Congress to zero-out what remained in next year’s budget. That appears to be what will happen, as the Senate and House execute a complex legislative maneuver to pass next year’s budget along party lines, including trillions of dollars in cuts. Whether the actions of the Executive Branch were, in fact, constitutional will be decided by the Courts.
Is supporting the humanities a “core Federal responsibility”?
For proponents of limited government, the answer to this question has, for decades, been “no.” Inspired by economists such as Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, the public arguments for limited government have morphed depending on the news cycle, but the overarching sentiment has remained the same: if something is meant to exist, it will be created or serviced by the private sector. Government works best when it stays out of the way of the private sector delivering goods and services directly to consumers. If the humanities are meant to exist, they will be underwritten by private donors or by private industry. Government should not be involved in propping them up, and should limit its activities to only critical functions such as national defense, law and order, policing and settling disputes among citizens through the courts.
Smaller government also means lower taxes, which appeals to many conservatives and libertarians. All government programs require revenue, and revenue is principally collected through taxation. The less the government spends, the less taxation becomes necessary. In this theoretical framework, government spending is also responsible for inflation. Drastically cutting government spending is theorized to drive down inflation, lower the need for taxation, and spur the private sector to step in where government has retreated, ushering in a new era of economic growth. But DOGE is also guided by an ideology that believes there are, simply, some activities that the Federal government was never intended to partake in, and doing so constitutes broad government overreach. Such activities might confer benefits on certain groups of people, but even so, those costs should not be diffused across the broader population.
I happen to disagree with this interpretation on the role of government—and so did President Lyndon B. Johnson.
In 1965, President Johnson signed into law the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act. The law stated, in part, that “the encouragement and support of national progress and scholarship in the humanities and the arts, while primarily a matter for private and local initiative, are also appropriate matters of concern to the Federal Government.” The law went on to state that, “an advanced civilization must not limit its efforts to science and technology alone, but must give full value and support to the other great branches of scholarly and cultural activity in order to achieve a better understanding of the past, a better analysis of the present, and a better view of the future.”
This vision did not emerge out of a vacuum. The drive for an endowment that would support the arts and the humanities—what became the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities—was very much informed by the emerging concerns of the decade. The Space Race, the proliferation of television as a “vast wasteland,” to quote former FCC chairman Newton Minnow, and the passions of scholars, journalists, philanthropists and senior government officials convinced Members of Congress from both parties that American global leadership and democracy would not endure through technology alone. Rather, as the legislation stated, “democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens.” The act continued, “It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.”
“Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens. It must therefore foster and support a form of education, and access to the arts and the humanities, designed to make people of all backgrounds and wherever located masters of their technology and not its unthinking servants.” - National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities Act of 1965
Initially focused on large national projects, starting in the 1970s the humanities endowment instituted a “state committee” model to reach local populations in more effective ways and address local questions. By the 1980s, these “state committees” had transformed into the “state humanities councils” that we have today (e.g., Nevada Humanities Council, Michigan Humanities Council, etc). Since the state humanities councils have very few staff and serve the entirety of their states, Congress charged NEH with ensuring that a portion of its federal funding each year got passed to the states and territories for them to support their local programs. Over the years these funds have helped support libraries, museums, historical sites, high schools, colleges, lecture series, oral histories, historical reenactments, book festivals, teacher institutes, digital encyclopedia and fellowships for writers, educators and scholars.
The late 1960s also saw the creation of The Wilson Center, emerging from a similar set of historical conditions. The Wilson Center was the nation’s official memorial to President Woodrow Wilson. As a university president who became President of the United States, the Congress of the late 1960s believed that a scholarly center that bridged the worlds of academia and policymaking would be an appropriate tribute to the former President, in addition to helping America win the Cold War by attracting international scholars to Washington, D.C. to help inform policy and strengthen alliances. The late James H. Billington, formerly the U.S. Librarian of Congress, led The Wilson Center during the 1980s. (Fun fact: apart from Members of Congress and Library of Congress staff, The Wilson Center was the only institution allowed to check out books from the Library of Congress.) Billington was a historian of Russia and the Soviet empire, and during his tenure The Wilson Center played an important role in advising the Reagan Administration as it navigated the Cold War intellectually and diplomatically.
The last of the three organizations, IMLS, was created in the 1990s when Congress combined two pre-existing programs: the Institute of Museum Services, which had been part of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities since 1976, and the Library Programs Office, which had been part of the Department of Education since 1956. At the time of its creation, the Clinton Administration noted in its policy rationale that “the arts, the humanities, and museum and library services are essential to the well-being, health, vitality, and democracy of our Nation. They are the soul of America, reflecting our multicultural and democratic experience.”
A significant portion of IMLS funding each year was diverted to the 125,000 libraries and 21,000 history museums in the U.S., both large and small. IMLS particularly focused on supporting libraries in Black communities, Hispanic communities, tribal nations, and rural areas with limited Internet access. As just one example, in its most recent Congressional Budget Justification, IMLS noted that it would deliver approximately $3 million to Native American and Native Hawaiian museums and libraries in order to help them preserve their heritage, train their workforce and support the National Tribal Broadband Summit, i.e. high-speed Internet for tribal nations.
For the past 60 years, then, a majority of Americans from all walks of life and on all sides of the political spectrum have felt that supporting the humanities were a Federal responsibility—not exclusively, but at least in part. That’s because the United States has never led the world based on our military might or scientific prowess alone—though both certainly have contributed. Part of our global leadership emanates from our powerful and unique ideas about democracy, freedom, human rights, diversity, tolerance, pluralism and good governance. Those ideas do not form on their own; they emerge from debate, discussion, research and critical inquiry, which is what the humanities do. The humanities use frameworks such as ethics, religion, philosophy and history to ask critical questions about ourselves, our society and our behavior. By asking those questions about our past, we discover better answers for the future.
This is not a modern-day phenomenon; it is a tradition that dates back to the very founding of the nation. American history is replete with institutions that today we recognize as humanities organizations: the American Philosophical Society, established by Benjamin Franklin in 1743; the Library of Congress, established by John Adams in 1800; the New York Public Library and the Free Library of Philadelphia both established in the 1890s; and the Federal Art Project, the Federal Writers' Project, and the Federal Theatre Project during the Great Depression. Asking critical questions about society is endemic to American democracy, with deep roots that extend into both the private and public sectors.
It is worth recalling, too, the text from the 1965 legislation about technology: that we must foster education, the arts and the humanities so that we become masters of our technology and not its “unthinking servants.” These words were written during a period where rapid innovations in science and technology, such as space travel and television, threatened to dilute American intellectual and cultural life. National leaders, recognizing the threats, stepped in to ensure that critical inquiry and reflective thinking would remain a bedrock of the American democratic experiment. Today, in an age of Artificial Intelligence, when we are, literally, outsourcing our thinking and writing to machines and Large Language Models, one would argue that we need more funding for the humanities, not less, particularly from the federal government. Indeed, this has been my clarion call for the past few years since History, Disrupted was released; in order to counterbalance the overweight status we afford technology in our lives, policymakers would be wise to increase spending on the humanities, lest we lose our humanity altogether.
What does all of this mean for the humanities in the United States—and for American society more broadly?
Several of the administration’s Executive Orders are being challenged in court, so we shall await to see whether the actions by the Administration were Constitutional or whether they overstepped their Constitutional authority. And we will await to see what Congress decides to do with the federal budget; I encourage all readers in the U.S. to contact their representatives and let them know your feelings.
In the short-term, however, many wonderful colleagues and friends will lose their jobs and many wonderful organizations will not be able to continue their work. Teachers will lose training opportunities; libraries will shutter services; museums will close their doors; oral history projects will stop conducting interviews; historic homes and houses will lose the ability to maintain their properties; scholars will lose funding to conduct research; international collaborations will be put on hold; and valuable artifacts from our nation’s history will be neglected. Will that make enough of a difference in American life for voters to notice? That likely depends on who you ask. But there is no doubt that there will be tens-of-thousands of Americans who are affected, and a countless number of ideas that will never get formed, questions that will never get asked, and answers that will never be formulated.
There is always the prospect that private philanthropy could step in where government has retreated. For the moment that seems unlikely; nearly $500 million each year dispersed among 125,000 libraries and 21,000 museums across 55 states and territories is difficult to replace, at least as quickly as institutions will need it to stay afloat. In general, over the past two decades, philanthropy has moved away from funding the humanities. Many organizations that used to fund humanities research have stopped, and while older generations tended to support museums, libraries and historical societies in their communities, younger generations have shown little appetite for such philanthropy. More broadly throughout American society, humanities disciplines have been in decline, humanities majors have dwindled, humanities departments at universities have shuttered, and the humanities as a broad umbrella of disciplines have been dwarfed in cultural and societal relevance by science, technology, engineering and math. The Federal government was one of the last stable sources of funding; without that support, it is not an exaggeration to say that the entire field faces existential collapse in the United States.
For complicity in this, we must all look in the mirror, as the collapse of the humanities is all of our faults. It shouldn’t have been the case that the 90% of any humanities organization’s budget would be from the federal government, or that humanities buildings on college campuses nary receive visits from incoming students. Each of us bears responsibility for the fading relevance of humanistic inquiry from public life as we have collectively prioritized business, tech, politics and entertainment while neglecting our intellectual and cultural needs. Perhaps this week will be a wake-up call that we must do more, speak louder and contribute more money in order to ensure that the humanities survive, and that our fellow citizens retain the wisdom and vision necessary to navigate these turbulent times.
Long-time readers of this newsletter know that for the past few years I had the honor to represent the United States overseas as a speaker with the U.S. Department of State. My role was to speak about disinformation and media literacy, but invariably as a representative of the United States our conversations would turn towards the state of American democracy more broadly.
On each mission I embarked on, I would comment to my audiences—diplomats and students alike—how imperative it was for a democracy to have a thriving intellectual culture rooted in historical and humanistic study. It simply was not possible to have a true democracy without them, because in a democracy you have to be able to ask critical questions of your elected representatives… and you won’t have the ability to ask those questions if you have not empowered your citizens to look at the past with honesty, accuracy and scrutiny.
The true greatness of America has always stemmed from our freedom to ask such questions, challenge authority, and demand better from our leaders and ourselves. That is what the humanities offer: a chance to appreciate all the beautiful things that humans do—from love and religion, to poetry and literature—as well as recognize all the horrible things that humans are capable of. You could make an argument that the federal government shouldn’t be involved in that business, but it is an argument that I will never abide. A government for the people and by the people has an obligation to support the study of those people in all their complexity.
Studying the humanities is an essential component of democracy. A government that abandons that responsibility is one that, I fear, might be willing to, one day, abandon democracy itself.
Have a good week,
-JS
Jason, this hits hard, cuts deep. It's crushing to think that IMLS, NEH, and the Wilson Center are casualties of this administration's dark, twisted worldview.
My first year out of college, I worked in the Smithsonian Castle for the special assistant to Secretary Ripley. It was an excellent first job because of my work experience (exhibitions and managing the furnishings collection) and the opportunities to meet many fascinating people. Often, I would walk up to the turret where the Wilson Center resided to say hi to its director, James Billington, and his staff. I had no idea that that scholarly, cozy place would one day expand monumentally... and then be taken down in a few short hours. Crushing.
Wilson the worse president ever. Not Obama, but Woodrow Wilson. Puppet for the Banksters. Sold out the country. He said so himself. No humanity in that.
“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country. A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men. We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.” Woodrow Wilson