‘Draconian’ Layoffs, Grant Terminations Come for the NEH

The National Endowment for the Humanities sent termination notices to 65 percent of its employees Thursday evening in a move that experts say will have far-reaching consequences for higher education institutions and the communities they serve.

The cuts to the NEH, which has a $200 million budget, come about a month after President Donald Trump forced out Shelly C. Lowe—the first Native American to head the agency—and a week after the agency terminated more than 1,000 grants. Many of those grants supported work at colleges and universities, including an initiative to digitize North Carolina Central University’s historical records, an oral history project at Kennesaw State University and a library renovation at the University of Missouri, according to a database of the terminated grants compiled by the Association for Computers and the Humanities.

The American Association of Colleges and Universities condemned the cuts.

“The administration’s actions target a vital agency that, although relatively small and chronically underfunded, has for the past sixty years made the humanities accessible to all Americans and supported cutting-edge research and scholarship,” the AAC&U said in a statement Friday. “The draconian cuts to NEH programs and staffing will ripple across American life—cultural, educational, historical, and economic—and they will negatively affect teaching and learning, scholarship and research. And notably, the cuts will have a disproportionate impact on those living in rural areas, where for many the only access to the humanities is provided through state and jurisdictional humanities councils.”

The NEH said the mass firings are “necessary to comply” with Trump’s executive order directing the Department of Government Efficiency to eliminate “waste, bloat, and insularity” within the federal government, according to a termination letter Inside Higher Ed reviewed and verified.

The deep cuts to NEH are just the latest purge by DOGE, which has already fired tens of thousands of employees across numerous federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Education and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Since its founding in 1965, the NEH has sent more than $6 billion in grants to museums, historical sites, libraries, state humanities councils and higher education institutions to support research, curriculum development and public programming, among other initiatives. This year, it had a grant budget of $74.4 million.

But before the NEH agrees to fund a project, that project has to go through a rigorous peer-review process. And those review panels, which are made up of scholars and other humanities experts, are what many of the roughly 117 NEH employees who were fired Thursday—out of a total staff of 180— helped facilitate. (It’s not yet clear which specific divisions the terminated employees worked for, and the NEH did not respond to that question by Friday afternoon.)

“Our peer-review process is extremely transparent. Applicants are able to request copies of reviewer comments, regardless of if they were successful,” said a now-fired NEH employee who spoke to Inside Higher Ed on the condition of anonymity. The source, who suspects more firings could be coming, added that NEH employees also help to review draft grant applications and support grantees throughout the life span of their projects. “Supporting the humanities field is at the core of our pride in our work,” the former employee said. “With such significant reductions in force, those services and support will be cut.”

And without that and the other support NEH workers provided for grant applicants and awardees, it will be harder for the agency to administer the grant programs that haven’t been terminated.

“With these reductions in force, there is a question about what kind of staff support will be available to continue to work on those grant lines that are still standing,” the former NEH employee said. “We’ve also seen a shift in some of the funding priorities based on what the administration has said are now their top priorities.”

Reframing American History

In addition to gutting the federal workforce, the Trump administration is attempting to wield its executive power to control how the United States remembers its history, which includes overcoming race-based slavery, the disenfranchisement of women and African Americans, and codified racial segregation.

In one such example, Trump last month issued an executive order entitled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which accused the Smithsonian Institution of coming “under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology” in recent years. The order prohibits the Smithsonian’s “expenditure on exhibits or programs that degrade shared American values, divide Americans based on race, or promote programs or ideologies inconsistent with Federal law and policy.”

The remaining staff at the NEH will also be tasked with carrying forward Trump’s vision for the public presentation of American history. At a meeting last Wednesday—one day before the NEH firings—the agency’s acting head told its advisory council that the NEH would support Trump’s plans for a patriotic sculpture garden and a celebration of the 250th anniversary of American independence on July 4, 2026, The New York Times reported.

But with Trump’s ideological mandate and a decimated staff, the NEH will struggle to fulfill its mission of helping the nation understand both the pain and the promise of its history.

“These cuts will impede the ability of humanities scholars to teach and research about the nature and history of our society,” Jim Grossman, outgoing executive director of the American Historical Association, told Inside Higher Ed Friday. “If you don’t do research and teach about the history of our society, you can’t learn and can’t make intelligent policy.”

Instead, Grossman said, the overhaul of the NEH signals yet another unprecedented move by Trump to “whitewash” American history. “There’s nothing wrong with patriotism, but there is something wrong with a narrow definition of patriotism,” he said.

“Historians and other humanists who research and teach in areas that lead them to be critical of the American past are patriotic because they’re doing work that makes us a better country,” he said. “When a person goes to the doctor, they don’t hide their medical history. If they do that, a doctor cannot help them. If our nation hides the history of our divisions, we cannot resolve them.”