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Bad times in the world of documentary filmmaking and also just reality this week, as Deadline reports that the Trump administration has killed 85 percent of grants issued by the National Endowment For The Humanities. The NEH does a lot of stuff with the money it hands out, but one of the big ones is funding documentaries, the producers and directors of which have to go through an extensive application process to prove that the films they’re working on will continue the Endowment’s mission of promoting the humanities in America.
The vast majority of said work having now been tossed right in the crapper, as acting chairman Michael McDonald (who took over after previous head Shelly Lowe was shown the door back in March) sent out letters to grant recipients late last week telling them the NEH was “repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.” Translation: Your funding’s been pulled, good luck getting your movie made now.
According to the government’s own spending data site, the NEH is currently (or was until very recently) on the hook for $56.6 million in grants after the first quarter of 2025, split up between its various projects. Not a ton of money, on the scale of U.S. government spending, but obviously huge for individual projects and films. (In the Deadline piece, most grant recipients who’d been terminated didn’t want to go on the record, for fear of retaliation, but Tracie Holder, a producer who was working on a film about the 1849 Astor Place Riot in New York, confirmed she’d gotten a $485,000 grant from the NEH to make her movie.) Trump’s White House has also reportedly cut downstream funding for state humanities boards, which typically receive about $50 million from the NEH to help fund local projects, so there’s another avenue for the arts that’s just been woodchippered. A list of media project awards granted by the NEH from just 2019 to 2022 lists dozens of projects in various stages of development; Ken Burns, famously, has worked with the NEH for years to get his movies funded.
Shocking no one, the NEH was apparently a frequent recipient of visits from Elon Musk’s pack of feral teens in recent weeks, with DOGE having apparently passed on directives telling the Endowment (originally created in 1965) to cut its staffing levels by 80 percent. The NEH’s funds are allocated and authorized via Congress; someone should probably let them know that, since they seem completely oblivious and/or inert when it comes to that fact.
