On April 2, a number of letters from the National Endowment for the Humanities were sent to arts and culture organizations across the country ending their previously awarded grants.
The letters, which appeared on NEH letterhead and were signed by NEH acting director Michael McDonald, told recipients that their “grant no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities” and its “immediate termination is necessary to safeguard the interests of the federal government, including its fiscal priorities.” The letter continued: “NEH has reasonable cause to terminate your grant in light of the fact that the NEH is repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the President’s agenda.”
Among the thousands of organizations affected by the grant terminations are state humanities councils in all 50 states, which often fund book festivals and literacy programs, as well as a number of libraries and archives. A number of NEH grant recipients took to social media or email blasts to lament the news and seek assistance.
On X, formerly Twitter, Oleh Kotsyuba, the director of print and digital publications at Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, noted that the grant his institution received, which was terminated, “was the first such federal grant we received for our publications in 40+ years.” He added, in an email to PW, that the grant “was supposed to help us hire an additional part-time editor to publish a bilingual anthology of Ukrainian-Jewish poetry (the first of its kind), two plays by Ukrainian modernist author Lesia Ukrainka, and a novel by Maik Yohansen, a modernist Ukrainian writer executed by Stalin’s NKVD in 1937.”
In an email blast, the organization Humanities Tennessee told its audience that “all state councils” received a notice of termination of their NEH grants on Thursday. The nonprofit cited “free reading and book programs like the Southern Festival of Books” and “young writer and reader programs like Student Readers Days that connect school students with authors while providing free books,” and “history programs commemorating the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence” as among the programs it will no longer be able to fund.
While the FY 2025 budget allocates $200.1 million for the NEH, including $74.4 million for the agency’s grant programs, an NEH official told NPR that “no upcoming awards” will be made in fiscal year 2025.
The termination of NEH grants comes about one day after the National Endowment for the Arts issued its annual report on the contribution the art and cultural sector makes to the U.S. economy. According to the report, the sector, including both commercial and nonprofit entities, added $1.2 trillion to the U.S. economy in 2023 and grew twice as fast as the overall economy between 2022 and 2023. The production generated by the sector represented 4.2% of GDP in 2023, the report found.
The NEA casts a wide net in identifying what industries are included in the art and cultural sector; overall 35 industry groups, including book publishing, are part of the sector. The largest arts industry in 2023 was web publishing and streaming, which includes internet publishing and broadcasting, music and film archives, comic syndicates, and news photo distribution services. Other large arts industries by value to GDP include broadcasting, government services (including arts education in public schools), traditional and software publishing, and motion picture and video industries.
At a time when some government officials dismiss the arts as an expensive frill, the report said that in 2023 the arts added more to U.S. GDP than did the sectors of agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting; mining; outdoor recreation; and transportation and warehousing. And in a moment when international trade and tariffs are front and center, the report found that in 2023, the total value of the nation’s arts exports was nearly $37 billion greater than the value of arts imports from other countries.
The sector is also an important source of employment, with nearly 5.4 million people working in the arts and cultural fields, according to the report.
The annual report “is a key resource in demonstrating the sheer economic power of the arts, and in acknowledging the breadth of industries that make up this sector, NEA director of research and analysis Sunil Iyengar said in a statement.