NEH Asks Grant Recipients if They Still Want Their Awards

The National Endowment for the Humanities—after losing in court over the termination of more than 1,400 grants, totaling over $100 million—began offering this month to reinstate those awards.

But first, the agency has a basic question for the grant recipients it previously cut off: “Do you want NEH to reinstate this award?”

“Evaluate your organization’s intent and capacity to determine whether you want to resume the project,” the agency says on its website, in a step-by-step explanation telling organizations and individuals how to fill out the “Reinstatement Assurances Form” to revive their grants.

The six-question form includes other basic inquiries, including one pertinent for projects that, by now, have been moribund for a year.

“Have there been any changes in key personnel?” the agency asks. It says it “permits a three-month restart period that you may use to reassemble staff, re-engage partners, or reestablish project infrastructure.”

Such grant reinstatements are what educators and researchers across the country have hoped for—and, in some cases, won—as they and the groups representing them have legally battled the Trump administration to restore thousands of canceled science and humanities grants. The NEH’s restoration process shows the complexities of putting the partnership between the federal government, institutions and scholars back together after the Department of Government Efficiency and others in the administration severed it.

In April 2025, DOGE and the NEH canceled these grants as part of DOGE’s federal agency–slashing spree. DOGE staffers used a large language model and their own judgment—despite lacking expertise in academic research or the humanities—to determine which grants violated the president’s anti–diversity, equity and inclusion executive orders. Artificial intelligence flagged grants with words such as “history” and “culture” as DEI-related. Michael McDonald, the NEH’s acting chair from March 2025 to January 2026, allowed DOGE staff to cancel grants.

The American Council of Learned Societies, the Modern Language Association and other groups sued. Last month, roughly a year after the terminations and the lawsuit filings, a federal judge ruled the cancellations unconstitutional under the First and Fifth Amendments.

MLA Executive Director Paula Krebs said the restoration comes “a year late for everybody—more than a year late,” saying people were counting on the money to carry out projects this year.

The NEH canceled roughly $90,000 in grants to the MLA, Krebs said. She said her organization put on hold a grant to support a meeting about assessing current and future data projects in the humanities, and it will now apply for reinstatement of that project. MLA went ahead and paid for a virtual workshop for language and literature teachers at small and midsize colleges, and it will now ask the NEH for reimbursement, as the restoration rules allow, Krebs said.

She said organizations like hers were less harmed than individual recipients, who “planned their whole academic years around these grants.”

“This was especially appalling for pretenure faculty members,” Krebs said, adding that “people’s careers depend on access to this kind of research support.”

But Krebs praised current NEH staff, saying they’re working to eliminate obstacles to funding restoration. As of April of last year, the Trump administration had terminated two-thirds of the agency’s workers. Krebs said there are “so few” people left to work on this revival.

“The fact that they’re being so nice and accommodating is just a testament to the kind of folks who are working for the NEH right now, through all of the stuff that they’ve been through,” she said.

The NEH didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Monday. On its website, the agency says it will “process reinstatements for organizations and individuals in the order they are received. Processing may take several months.”