BY WILLIAM D. ADAMS
The following first appeared on Medium and is republished with the author’s permission.
President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Arts and Humanities Act on September 29, 1965.
April 11, 2025
Only days after launching its attack on the Smithsonian Institution, the Trump administration and its DOGE shock troops came for the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Last week, NEH grant recipients were notified that all current funding is suspended. Also last week, the acting Chair of NEH, Michael McDonald, formerly the agency’s chief legal counsel, informed the agency that 80 percent of its staff would be let go. What remains of the agency’s resources will be directed toward “patriotic” purposes, now apparently including a National Garden of American Heroes.
The funding suspension leaves hundreds of cultural organizations and humanities researchers in the lurch. And without staff, NEH’s exemplary programs will cease to function. Whatever remains of the agency appears destined to become a propaganda arm of the Trump administration.
Everyone should understand that this is a national tragedy and a deeply unpatriotic one at that. At the federal level, NEH is the country’s principal expression of its commitment to our cultural and historical heritage. Since its founding in 1965, NEH has helped thousands of scholars, teachers, and organizations gather, preserve, interpret, explore, and share the country’s history and its remarkable cultural traditions and treasures. This important work has been produced for broad public consumption in a wide variety of media — books, exhibitions, radio and television programs, digital media, and films — and it has served a remarkable array of institutions, including museums, libraries, colleges and universities, high schools, and historic sites, to name a few. Hundreds of important books and scholarly projects have been underwritten by NEH funding. What the country knows and preserves and honors in its past and its cultural traditions and expressions is due in no small part to the remarkable work of NEH and the organizations and individuals it has supported. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of Americans who have been informed, entertained, encouraged, fascinated, enlightened, and inspired by the work that NEH has enabled for 60 years.
This remarkable, popular, and widely admired institution is now about to be destroyed. And once it is gone, it will be exceedingly difficult to reconstruct. It has taken six decades for NEH to build its grant-making capacity and the national cultural infrastructure and ecosystem that now flourishes across the country. It is being dismantled in the twinkling of an eye. Trump administration officials and the know-nothings at DOGE are proving that it is easy to break things. They know nothing about what it takes to build them.
The Trump administration’s intervention at NEH also violates the agency’s founding legislation and the authority of Congress. NEH and its sister agency, the National Endowment for the Arts, came into being through federal legislation in 1965. Like the National Science Foundation, NEH and NEA are independent agencies operating outside the command structure of the executive branch. This gives the agencies a measure of independence, free from the shifting political winds of presidential transitions and ideological manipulation. The funds distributed by NEH are part of the national budget, but Congress, not the White House, appropriates those funds. In Trump’s first term, the administration tried to eliminate the budgets of NEH and NEA. Congress had other ideas, and the agencies went on doing their important work with bipartisan support and benefit despite the opposition of the White House.
It is now clear to all that the Trump administration is prepared to ignore the law and time-honored Washington conventions in the service of its extreme and destructive ideological and political objectives. Congress must reclaim its Constitutional authority. Restoring NEH’s grant-making authority and reinstating its staff, budget, and programs is the perfect place to begin. But it seems unlikely that Congress will act without intense public pressure. That pressure must begin now.
William D. Adams served as the 10th Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2014–2017.
