This spring the Trump administration walloped the arts community when it slashed federal funding for literary arts and culture, taking major steps to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Thousands of organizations nationwide, from large independent publishers to tiny rural libraries, had already budgeted for grant funding when they received word that their grants had been terminated. Though many organizations had already spent the grant money allocated to them, some pending grants were simply revoked. The termination notices embodied the administration’s open hostility toward the arts and humanities and the mounting instability of federal funding many organizations have come to rely on. The government’s sudden reneging also threw institutions that hadn’t yet spent their grants into organizational chaos.
“I’ve come to think of the literary community as an ecosystem—and ours is fragile,” says Daniel Slager, the publisher of Milkweed Editions, a nonprofit publisher that, like most, relies on revenue from book sales, private donations, and government grants. Without support for “keystone species,” as Slager calls independent publishers, literary magazines, arts organizations, event spaces, and the like, this ecosystem will collapse.
While these cuts are crushing to the literary community, eliminating federal grants for the arts is not a significant cost-saving measure, despite claims from the recently created Department of Government Efficiency that state otherwise. For example, the typical annual budget of the NEA costs the average American under eighty cents per year, and the canceled literary awards from this year’s cohort of NEA grant recipients amount to 0.0000002 percent of the 2025 federal budget. {read}