As Elon Musk’s DOGE group and the Trump administration continue to slash federal spending, the New Mexico Humanities Council, which provides support for and directly runs programs that enrich and preserve culture and the arts, might have to close its doors after the termination of federal grants.
The council lost about half a million dollars, which represents close to half its budget.
Council Executive Director Brandon Johnson, said he received a letter late Wednesday night notifying him that he would be losing two key federal grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as part of a larger gutting of the independent federal agency.
The NEH is the nation’s biggest funder of the humanities, which include history, philosophy, literature, ethics, media and cultural studies and much more. Johnson says the New Mexico Humanities Council fulfills a similar role at the state level, passing through grant funding to local cultural projects.
But, Johnson said, the programs they help fund could be lost altogether if the council is forced to close, which is likely without some sort of intervention.
“if cultural programs like this, school programs, new exhibits in museums, library programs, if those are important to your listeners, then they have an opportunity to do something about that.” he said. “They can approach people who have power and make their voices heard.”
The council does have some reserve funds and cash on hand, but says it won’t be enough to keep the doors open long.
“It's hard to know,” he said. “I mean, in the worst case, you know, could be just a couple months, unfortunately.”
The council does have a few events already planned and paid for that will take place in the upcoming months which can be viewed on their website.
The following is a portion of KUNM’s interview with Johnson:
KUNM: Did you have any sort of forewarning or notice, or did these letters come out of the blue?
JOHNSON: We got these letters out of the blue, and it was late at night, around 11 o'clock, I received an email from an address that was not an official NEH.gov address. We actually got two letters because we have two open grants right now — or had open grants — one for general operating support, one for wildfire recovery. The letter was basically, you know, we want to use this money for other things. The interesting thing about this is that the grants were made with money appropriated by Congress, which, according to the Constitution, holds the power of the purse, so these were legally granted funds. And the letter basically said “we're terminating your grant. The administration has other priorities” and that's essentially where they left it. There's been no direction beyond the letters as to what we can and can't do. Really, all we have in terms of communication about this are the letters
KUNM: So let's dig into the grants themselves a little bit more. Can you explain for our listeners what exactly this means? What won't be happening going forward with these gone? What did they allow you guys to do, and what's the plan going forward without those funds?
JOHNSON: So in terms of the general operating support grant, the larger of the two, that enables us to do a wide variety of programs in New Mexico. So we provide grants — pass through federal grants. A lot of organizations in New Mexico are rather small, and in rural areas. I'm thinking of libraries, museums, cultural centers, tourism bureaus, that sort of thing. The Mexico Humanities Council has been kind of the go between to provide grants to people in the state or organizations in the state that seek humanities funding. So, if they want to do things like oral histories, or a museum exhibit or reading a discussion program in their library, they can come to us and apply for funding. We also do National History Day, which, luckily, is funded in part by the state of New Mexico, which we’re eternally grateful for, but there are other costs associated with it that come out of our federal grants that we will no longer be able to cover. And so that program will suffer as well. If the New Mexico Humanities Council goes away, then what happens to National History Day? Where does that go? So that's what we're dealing with on the general operating support grants.
The wildfire recovery grant was made in response to the fires in northern New Mexico a couple years ago, and disasters affect culture. They affect cultural institutions that might be damaged – they affect the the sort of human archive of significant stories of a place. When people who are affected by fire, flood or whatever, end up leaving, they take their stories with them. They take their artifacts with them. their historical treasures, family history treasures… and that leaves the community poorer, culturally, than before. So through that program we were giving seed money to a number of different cultural nonprofits that were working on enabling people to collect stories, and to reconnect traditional agricultural ways,
KUNM: For listeners who aren't quite sure, what exactly is the basis of the New Mexico Humanities Council? Do you guys work for the state? Are you a nonprofit? Can you explain how that works real quick?
JOHNSON: We're an independent nonprofit. We support the entire state, and we do it with a very small staff. What’s interesting is, If you think about the cost of all of NEH, it costs each American less than the cost of a postage stamp. And if you think about the money that's just coming to the New Mexico Humanities Council, that's even smaller, right? So we're doing a huge amount of work around a state that's territorially very big and we're doing it with a small staff, and a relatively small budget. I mean, it's a molecule in a drop in the bucket, right? If we're thinking about the entire national budget. You can't balance the federal budget on the back of the National Endowment for the Humanities, right? You can't. You have to look at other areas. And do we want to become a country that only thinks about making money and not having access to the things that are beautiful in the world? Books, art… these things are essential for the human spirit.
Support for this coverage comes from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
