Amidst its various sustained attacks on, basically, everything—immigration, public health policy, diplomacy, the environment, science, movies, honestly, take your pick—the Trump administration has also been waging a sustained attack on the arts and humanities ever since taking office back in January. Elon Musk’s pack of feral teenagers, DOGE, has instituted cuts on pretty much every federal arts funding organization America has got, including the National Endowment For The Arts and the National Endowment For The Humanities, which, between the two of them, filter down millions in federal funds each year to local arts and humanities organizations across the country.
Now, some of the state-level bodies that oversee that funding are pushing back, with ARTnews reporting that the Federation Of State Humanities Councils and member organization Oregon Humanities have launched a lawsuit in Oregon against both DOGE and the NEH, accusing them of “the disruption and attempted destruction” of the latter group. The lawsuit calls for the resumption of terminated grants from the NEH, and an assurance that funds earmarked for these bodies by Congress will continue to flow.
DOGE went after the NEH back in early April, cutting both direct grant funding, and money distributed through state councils, which operate as independent, non-governmental, non-profit partners with the NEH. (Not long after, Trump released a budget plan gutting the NEA.) The thing about the NEH, though, is that it’s one of those rare government-affiliated groups that enjoys pretty strong bipartisan support in Congress, because the organization (like the NEA) is fairly scrupulous about spreading funding around evenly; there are very few areas in the United States that don’t get at least some money from the NEH, funding things like reading programs, community support groups, and documentaries focused on local subjects. None of which has stopped DOGE from taking a buzzsaw to the whole organization. (Hence the lawsuit, which follows similar filings from the Authors Guild and other humanities groups.)
Here’s Phoebe Stein, president of the Federation of State Humanities Councils, which serves as an organizing body for the various state groups: “Funding for the humanities benefits every single American, and support for this work and humanities councils has historically been bipartisan. Federal dollars from NEH flow through the state and jurisdictional humanities councils to community organizations in nearly every county in the country. State and jurisdictional humanities councils help veterans heal, teach children to read skillfully and think critically, and provide grants to community projects that simply would not happen without these resources. Even the loss of one humanities council would be one too many in what has been a powerful network serving the American public.”
