Austin humanities grants canceled by Trump administration
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The Trump administration has canceled federal humanities research grants worth millions of dollars — including money for Austin-based projects, per interviews and a data analysis by Axios.
Why it matters: Since 1965, grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) support scholarship on what the agency calls "the building blocks of American civil society."
Driving the news: The LBJ-era agency has been virtually shuttered.
- The agency's workforce was put on administrative leave late last week, per NPR, and the flow of money appears to have been largely frozen, the New York Times reported.
State of play: Fifteen projects involving Austin-area writers, historians and academics are currently in the middle of active NEH grants.
- The grants, which total $7 million, have not yet been fully paid out, per a review of grant records by Axios. Final checks from the federal government were scheduled for either later this year, 2026 or 2027.
Zoom in: The biggest grant is a five-year, $5.9 million award to Humanities Texas, whose mission is to improve classroom teaching and support libraries and museums.
- All told, the nonprofit currently receives $2.6 million per year from NEH— about 65% of its annual budget.
What they're saying: Humanities Texas leaders wrote in a message to supporters that they learned last week that their federal funding was terminated, effective immediately.
- "These cuts will have a devastating effect," the organization wrote.
- "Humanities Texas has served Texans of all ages for five decades through programs that improve classroom teaching, support libraries and museums, and create opportunities for lifelong learning."
Austin-based professor Jena Heath learned Monday that her grant, to develop an oral history curriculum for first generation college students, had been canceled.
- She said she had received about a third of the roughly $60,000 grant.
- The cancellation feels "like a rolling-up of the cultural life of this country," Heath told Axios.
Alison Macor, an Austin-based independent scholar who received payment for a $30,000, 6-month grant for her next nonfiction book — about the making of 1939 film "The Women" and more largely about gay Hollywood and studio power — told Axios the grant "was crucial to her research."
- The grant helped pay for travel to archives in Los Angeles and for writing time.
- Macor, who previously wrote a history of the Austin film scene, said she was relieved to have received the final payment of her grant in early January.
Zoom out: Other people whose NEH grants were active as of the beginning of this month include University of Texas professors working on projects about:
- The intertwined histories of the Imperial Sugar Company, the founding of the city of Sugar Land and the Texas penitentiary system.
- The scientific and agricultural exchanges between Chile and the United States in the 20th century.
- Black Cuban immigrants and their communities in the U.S. South during the 1960s and 1970s.
The other side: NEH says it's "repurposing its funding allocations in a new direction in furtherance of the president's agenda."
- As much as 85% of the agency's grants will be canceled, and the acting director told senior leaders that the NEH would emphasize patriotic programming, the New York Times reported.