Approximately 100 employees at the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), around two-thirds of the workforce, were laid off on 10 June, when the Trump administration’s “reduction in force” initiative went into effect. The news comes from NEH’s union, the American Federation of Government Employees Local 3403. Fewer than 60 employees are anticipated to remain at NEH.
"A major agency restructuring is underway without the appropriate planning needed to ensure the continuity of operations," the union said in a statement. "These drastic changes… represent an existential threat to those institutions and individuals who rely on support from NEH to research, preserve and interpret our shared heritage.”
NEH, which oversees a $207m budget to fund humanities programmes in all 50 states, cancelled more than 1,000 of its grants in early April, sending regional humanities councils all over the country into panic as their budgets were slashed overnight. The cuts inspired a spate of high-profile lawsuits intended to stall Trump’s radical restructuring of the federal government. Institutions have appealed the cuts en masse. NEH has supported public history, library, museum and educational programmes in the US since its founding in 1965 to the tune of more than $6bn.
The agency also announced that it will offer only half of its typical endowment opportunities, instead redirecting resources to Trump’s “Garden of Heroes” project, which will offer individual artists up to $600,000 to make life-size statues of a total of 250 American luminaries. The opening of the Garden of Heroes, which has yet to announce a location, is scheduled to coincide with the US’s semiquincentennial next year, commemorating the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
NEH’s union addressed this re-prioritisation in its statement, saying: “It is absurd to think that grant dollars that were being used to do things like publish President George Washington’s writings, restore Mark Twain’s artefacts and support civics education are instead being directed to commission statues. While NEH staff have the expertise to help provide historic context about these individuals and their impact, commissioning the artworks falls well outside of the agency’s purview. History is not something that can be set in stone.”
Trump’s administration has axed NEH funding for a variety of causes that the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) deems “unpatriotic”, including Indigenous and Hispanic-serving institutions and training for kindergarten teachers.
